Parents who hire elite tutors are setting up their kids for failure
Tutors do homework, write papers, oversee every class. Will they help with a kid’s first job too?
At a curriculum night, my son’s English teacher told the gathered parents that tutors should not be writing papers for students. Maybe I am naive, but I was a little shocked. This was a Brooklyn school, not a place with billionaires taking private jets to St. Barts for the weekend. I knew ChatGPT was an issue, which also came up, but this seemed somehow more corrupt and orchestrated. In the midst of the collegial evening, the teacher’s comment suddenly illuminated, for a moment, the ugly fact that rich people weren’t just buying opportunities for their children but were brazenly cheating.
The practice is hardly uncommon. David Blobaum from the National Test Prep Association told me that he was approached by a parent to write a kid’s college essay and he refused. “Honestly, these parents should think of themselves as hiring a criminal, not a tutor," he said. I heard about another tutor who did write a college essay for a kid, after a certain amount of moral struggle, figuring that if she didn’t do it someone else would.
By now the caricature of rich parents trying to buy a way into the Ivy League for their children is familiar, but some of what I heard was still startling. A tutor at an otherwise legitimate tutoring business told me that the company sends her “a ninth-grade math homework, and I finish it and send it back without ever even meeting the kid." Or they send a U.S. history paper to be written in the next three hours.
Do these parents think that they are helping their children by farming out their homework? Do they care if their kid develops intellectually and emotionally? This may be how they move through the world, purchasing a kind of frictionless appearance of a good life.
It seems to me that the children who are writing their own papers or studying for their own tests have an advantage here. They are learning to work, to write, to risk, to struggle, to fail, while these over-tutored children are learning to pay someone else to do work for them. How do you gain confidence if your tutor turned in an “A" paper on “The Great Gatsby?" If these children actually read “Gatsby" they might learn something about the futility of materialism.
Aside from overt cheating, there is something generally toxic in the tutoring culture of many elite private schools. There is a vogue for tutors who are paid to boost the grades of otherwise decent students in a frantic push before college applications. Amanda Uhry, the owner of Manhattan Private School Advisors, told me that this often backfires. “It is a real case of diminishing returns after a point. You trade a B+ for an A, but you wind up with a stressed-out, freaked-out kid and that goes on for a lifetime," she said. “Some children need tutors, but more than half the tutored children we see absolutely do not."
In this relentless push for achievement, the over-tutored kid is by definition never good enough. Parents are sending them the crippling message that they are not capable of doing what they need to do on their own. They can only be accomplished or impressive enough with a paid professional to get them there. One tutor I spoke to has seen exhausted, over-pressured children who have a tutor for every single class. How are they going to make it through life if they need constant hand holding just to function as a high-school student? It is no small irony that this kind of over-tutoring is creating underprepared children.
Somewhere in this repellent situation there are probably good intentions. There is the very understandable desire to help and nurture and protect your kid. There is the physical reassurance of a helpful human at the kitchen table talking things through.
But a history class teaches more than history; students learn to work and struggle and think things through. Kids who believe that they can buy someone to help them with hard things aren’t going to develop the resilience and work ethic that they need for true accomplishment beyond school. They may be able to glide through a certain kind of rich person’s existence, but they are not equipped for innovation and adaptation and grit.
These parents are so panicked about their kids going to Ivy League schools and after that onto banks and hedge funds and prestigious companies that they are neglecting to create kids who can actually function in these places.
I hadn’t known until recently that some of these children keep their tutors through college. I have even heard of people who keep tutors for help with the job search. Where does this end? Will the tutor tinker with memos for their jobs? Will the tutors stay up late managing their spreadsheets? Write their wedding vows? These rich scions will go through the motions of competent adulthood without ever having picked up the skills.
One tutor recalled meeting some of these over-tutored children at college. “I know a bunch of these children to have intense drug problems and anxiety, to be some of the most miserable people I know, but ostensibly they will always have this story of being successful and rich," she said. “Meanwhile, this kid is a train wreck."
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