A version of this piece originally ran on my personal Substack, Sticky Note Thoughts. The response made me want to share it here too.
If you’re a family trying to find the right tutor, the hardest part isn’t the search. It’s knowing what you’re actually paying for. And if you’re a tutor trying to figure out what your work is worth, the hardest part is that the loudest signals in this industry are coming from platforms that have every incentive to tell you the answer is: not much.
This week, I got a LinkedIn message from someone on the Varsity Tutors sourcing team.
“New remote opportunity - SAT Tutor at Varsity Tutors. Given your background, I think you’d be a great fit.”
I asked what the pay rate was.
The standard rate, she explained, starts at $20 an hour. SAT includes a subject bonus that brings it to $24. After my fifth session with the same student, my rate would go up by $1 per additional session, up to a ceiling of $40. If I wanted to be considered, I’d need to complete an application and a short online AI interview.
A human recruiter was describing a process that ends with an AI deciding if I’m qualified. For a job that starts at $20 an hour ($24 if you count the bonus they’re dangling) and maxes out at $40.
I wrote back:
“Leigh, respectfully, I’ve been doing this for 18 years (maybe you didn’t read my LinkedIn profile) and sit on the board of the National Test Prep Association. I was paid $20/hour at Kaplan when I started doing this in 2008. Your offer is, frankly, offensive.”
I meant it. And then I started thinking about why.
If you’ve ever booked a tutor through a platform, the hourly rate you pay and the hourly rate your tutor receives are not the same number. A company like Varsity Tutors sits in the middle: you pay the platform, the platform pays the tutor, and the platform keeps a significant cut for the app, the algorithm, the brand.
Varsity Tutors is owned by a publicly traded company called Nerdy Inc. (NYSE: NRDY), one of the largest tutoring platforms in the country. They’ve been leaning hard into AI. Their tutors are now screened via AI interview, and their newest product is called Live+AI™, which the company describes as combining “the insight, empathy, and adaptability of expert educators with the real-time precision and limitless scale of AI.”
Their stock trades at under a dollar.
What they charge families: between $70 and $100 an hour. What they offered me: $20 base, $24 with the bonus. The person in the room (or on Zoom) with your kid is taking home less than a quarter of what you paid.
I want to be fair, because I started inside this model and it gave me something real. Kaplan, arguably the original test prep company, trained me, which I needed. I was an undergraduate learning how to teach, getting paid while I figured it out. This was 2008. I had a BlackBerry. The first iPhone had just come out and nobody I knew had one. AI was science fiction. Most test prep was still happening in person, in classrooms and libraries and at kitchen tables. The tradeoff felt fair because I was genuinely at the beginning, and the structure Kaplan provided was worth something.
By 2013 I was full-time, working throughout the tristate area. By 2014 I was managing content and curriculum, leading revisions for the 2015 PSAT and 2016 SAT redesign. I trained tutors. I developed materials. I taught low-income students through partnerships with the NYC Department of Education. Then I left, joined a boutique firm, became one of their most requested tutors, came on full-time, became the top-grossing tutor, served as Director of School Partnerships, trained tutors to work with neurodiverse students, and wrote the company’s e-book on Executive Function. I got a Professional Certificate in Learning Differences and Neurodiversity from Landmark College Institute for Research & Training. In 2023, I founded Kate Fisher Tutoring.
I’m listing all of this because I want you to understand what the platform couldn’t see when it decided $24 was the right opening number.
The family pays $100. The tutor sees $24. The platform keeps the rest. And if you want the job, you interview with an AI first.
Leigh’s message noted that “tutors who build strong, long term relationships with students are able to steadily increase their hourly rate over time.” I want to sit with that for a second. The relationship between a tutor and a student is not a feature that unlocks a raise. It’s the whole point of the work. The trust, the consistency, the fact that a good tutor knows your kid well enough to hear something’s off before the student says a word. That’s what tutoring that actually works looks like. And the base rate for that is $20 an hour.
When I built KFT, I chose to do this differently. Our tutors set their own rates, based on their own read of their experience and what their work is worth. We don’t assign rates. We don’t cap them. The tutor is the product, and the person providing that should decide what it costs.
What a platform can’t price is the tutor who has seen the same mistake eight hundred times and fixes it in the first ten minutes. Or the one who notices your kid shuts down when she gets something wrong and quietly rebuilds the session around that. Or the one who texts you after because something came up that felt worth mentioning. That attunement takes years. It doesn’t come from an app.
When you’ve coached test pacing for a decade, you hear hesitation before it shows up in the score. When you’ve worked with hundreds of neurodiverse students, you’re not guessing at accommodations, you’re diagnosing. You can’t really put an hourly rate on any of that. It’s everything that happened before the hour started.
This industry runs on trust. Families trust that the person they’re paying for is the person showing up. Tutors trust that the work they’ve spent years building is worth something. Somewhere right now a family is paying $100 an hour assuming their tutor is seeing most of it. And somewhere, a tutor with almost two decades of experience is being offered $20 and told it’s competitive. A platform that charges $100, pays $20, and screens its tutors by algorithm is built on the assumption that nobody will do the math.
The fix isn’t complicated: pay tutors fairly, and tell families the truth about where their money goes.
Why it matters
For families: the platform fee is not the tutor’s fee. Before you book, ask where your tutor trained, how long they’ve been doing this, and what happens between sessions. Those questions will tell you more than any search filter.
For tutors: if you’ve built something real and want to work somewhere that sees it, we’d love to talk. At KFT, you decide what your work is worth. Full stop.
This piece first appeared on our Substack. Read it there or subscribe to get new essays on testing, admissions, and learning in your inbox.