Ivy Graduates Earn Big Fees as N.Y. Tutors

As an undergraduate at Harvard, Evan Hepler-Smith earned $12 an hour to tutor fellow undergraduates in physics and organic chemistry. But when he moved to New York two years ago, he began charging nearly eight times as much. Mr. Hepler-Smith's $100-an-hour wage, which he thinks is "a lot of money," is actually below the market rate. Tutors with an Ivy League education are regularly making $200 an hour or more preparing Manhattan high school students for the SAT and helping them write their college essays.

"I've had days where I made over $1,000," Mr. Hepler-Smith said.

The author of "The Manhattan Family Guide to Private Schools," Victoria Goldman, says she thinks the cost of private tutoring is worth it.

"I have found in my vast research and personal experience that you get what you pay for," she said. Ms. Goldman said she has paid for the highest-end private tutors for her two children for college and law school preparation. Each got into their top-choice school.

The secret, she says, is the tutors that they used. Ms. Goldman chose Advantage Testing tutors, where rates start at $195 for a 50-minute session in Manhattan. Almost every tutor on Advantage's roster has one or more Ivy League degrees, along with distinctions such as magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa.

A junior at the University of Rochester who grew up on the Upper East Side, Beth Rosner, said she paid her SAT tutor $400 for each hour-and-a-half session when she was a senior at a private Manhattan high school.

Ms. Rosner also spent $2,000 on a private essay-writing coach, who was a Harvard graduate and a playwright living in New York. The majority of her classmates at the Ramaz School paid for private tutors as well, she said.

Many of the New York City parents who are paying for private tutors are doing it on top of private school tuitions, which cost upward of $30,000. Despite the financial crisis, private college tutors said they haven't seen any drop in business, but have instead seen more demand than ever.

While companies such as Advantage Testing set the student up with one of their tutors, tutors who work independently rely on word of mouth or free postings on places like Craigslist.

"My Craigslist post was basically a litany of all my standardized test scores," Mr. Hepler-Smith said. As for his Harvard degree, "it was the be-all and end-all of getting clients."

Not all Ivy League-educated Manhattan tutors cost three figures an hour. Ivy League Network Tutors charge between $47 and $62 an hour.

"I really try to give families an alternative to the $200-an-hour model," the company's founder, Lisa Speransky, said. A Manhattan native and graduate of Bronx Science and Columbia, Ms. Speransky employs 25 tutors, many of them currently students at Columbia. She considers this an advantage.

"You don't need someone with a Ph.D. in math to work with your 15-year-old in algebra. You need someone who can connect, who can be a role model," Ms. Speransky said.

Her clients include both public and private school students. At private schools, admissions counselors often send her students from less-affluent families.

"There was some sense of, 'Why is it so inexpensive? What's wrong with it?'" she said.

Ms. Speransky, who has a full-time job in addition to running Ivy League Network Tutors, said that main reason she runs her business is to "allow people to afford tutoring, to help their kid do better in school."

But for many whose main source of income is tutoring, charging the market rate makes sense. A former admissions officer at Columbia, Dina Epstein, is now a law student earning money on the side as a private college consultant.

"I stopped working in admissions to go to law school and basically, from the day that I quit, people were asking for advice," Ms. Epstein said. "I thought, this is ridiculous, I shouldn't be giving this away for free."

Ms. Epstein now charges $375 for a one- to two-hour session to help high school students craft their college applications.

A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, Sol Stern, said the prices parents are willing to pay for private tutors pale beside the $50,000 a year that college tuition bills can be.

Mr. Stern said he paid $150 an hour for a private tutor for his son, who went to Stuyvesant High School. "And we thought she was the best tutor in the city," he said.