Varsity Tutors Review

What is Varsity tutors?

Varsity Tutors is a tutoring marketplace that offers private tutoring online and in-person. They offer over 1,000+ subjects on the platform ranging of topics from Math to Fornite coaching, but they are primarily focused on academic tutoring.

When the company launched in 2007, they primarily offered in-person lessons to serve their customers. In recent years, the company has now focused heavily on going online, and have serviced over 3M lessons in total.

Who is Varsity Tutors For?

The majority of users for Varsity Tutors seem to be parents and grandparents signing up for their child or grandchild. Since Varsity Tutors offers topics that range from Kindergarden all the way to college level (and more), the age of parents will vary heavily. Safe to say though that if you’re a parent, academic tutoring is something you are looking to offer to help your child succeed in school.

The other market that Varsity Tutors serve is students themselves. Those students who are old enough (likely college students) can sign up directly to get help with their school work or younger students will likely use their parent’s credit cards.
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Focus & Specialty

As we previously mentioned, Varsity Tutors was founded to primarily offer tutoring for academic subjects such as Math, Science, Social Studies, and English. The sub-topics will vary according to the age of the student that is using the service. For example, if a student is between Kindergarden and Grade 7, they will want to connect with tutors teaching Elementary Math. If a student is in college, they may want to connect with a Calculus Math tutor instead.

In addition, Varsity Tutors also has tutors for test preps such as MCAT, LSAT, GMAT and more.

Price

Pricing for Varsity Tutors is on the higher end, where they charge around $70 to $95 USD per hour for their private tutoring sessions.

Here’s a breakdown if you purchase:

12 hours: $95/hour ($1,140)
24 hours: $80/hour ($1,920)
36 hours: $75/hour ($2,700)
48 hours: $73/hour ($3,504)

Price comparison of similar apps to Varsity Tutors:

Rype: ~$25-$30/hour
Chegg: $30/hour
Wyzant: $50-$75/hour

Alternative to Varsity Tutors

If you’re looking for quality tutoring from handpicked professional tutors, paying up to $90 USD per hour may not be feasible for you. Especially when you can get a fair and affordable price without needing to sacrifice quality. This is where Rype comes in.

How is Rype different from Varsity Tutors?

On a high-level, both Rype and Varsity Tutors offers 1-on-1 academic tutoring with professional handpicked teachers. Rype’s membership also includes language lessons like Spanish, English, French, and more. Our differentiation comes from being able to do 3 things well at the same time:

Access to handpicked professional tutors
Ability to book on-the-go and around your busy schedule
Giving all of this for you at a fair price with an all-access membership

1. Pay Per Lesson (Varsity Tutors) vs. Simple Flat Price (Rype)

The pricing structure of Varsity Tutors is probably a major difference to what Rype offers. Compared to a flat membership model, Varsity Tutors makes you pay upfront for lesson packages. When breaking it down to a per hour price, this can come to around $70 to $90 USD per hour.

At Rype we pay a competitive price to our tutors, and have committed to maintaining quality of teachers and taking a smaller cut of the price. In short, this means that you pay less while getting the same quality.

There are a few reasons why we believe this is the most sustainable model:

1. Just like a drop-in gym, there’s a lack of incentive for students to continue their lessons after the first lesson experience. This motivates students who are learning Math or Spanish to continue their lessons, just like a gym membership.

2. There is a massive premium that tutoring services like Varsity Tutors charge. This can be great for the corporation because it gives them the profits to reinvest into growth, but it is a bad deal for parents and students like you paying for the service.

3. On Rype, you get access to not just academic lessons but language lessons (and much more soon). That means, you’re not just limited to taking academic lessons, and you can branch out your curiousity and therefore gain value without paying more.

Rype, like Netflix, has introduced a new model to language lessons. It’s a simple, flat fee where you don’t have to think about pulling out your credit card for each lesson. You can focus on what matters, which is consistent learning, and finding teachers that are fit to meet your needs.

2. Rype Teachers are Handpicked

Rype handpicks every one of our teachers for not just qualifications, but personality and professionality. We want our students to feel in a comfortable setting when they’re practicing a new language, and we take the little details into consideration, including a teacher’s level of patience, friendliness, and interesting hobbies.

3. Rype is Built for Busy People

As busy individuals ourselves, we get that students who need academic tutoring have busy schedules. Whether they’re playing sports, attending club activities, etc., Rype both give you the option of learning anywhere you want, and almost anytime you want. However, every lesson on Varsity Tutors is at least 60 minutes long. This may not matter for some people, but for many busy people, that extra 30 minutes a day can add up if you extend that to a month or year from now.

This is why we built Rype with 30 minute lessons as a standard time slot, allowing anyone to fit lessons into their busy lifestyle.

4. Rype is Free to Try

We feel confident in our offer to allow you to experience for free. No need to get on a sales call which takes up more of your time to sell you on our offering. Just sign up by yourself, and browse around the platform by yourself or with your child, and book a lesson with one of our teachers. 100% risk-free.