5 ms·

I have a friend whose company charges up to $1000/hour [sic] for SAT and other tutoring. And parents in NYC and SF pay it. And succeed in getting their kids int

I have a friend whose company charges up to $1000/hour [sic] for SAT and other tutoring. And parents in NYC and SF pay it. And succeed in getting their kids into Stanford, Harvard, etc. I have another friend, an accomplished author, who says "I paid for my house writing term papers" for rich, lazy college students. Not sure which schools. If you're just trying to make it on your own, it's tough to compete against all this. Without SAT tutoring or parental money, I earned degrees from two elite schools, but these days - who knows whether I'd even have got in.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
mhurron 13y ago
> I have a friend whose company charges up to $1000/hour [sic] for SAT Not understanding the use of [sic] here.
- kilovoltaire 13y ago
  I think they're using it to mean "this is not a typo". Sort of unusual use since they're not quoting anything.
  - auctiontheory 13y ago
    That's right. Not a typo. Unbelievable but true.
    - avar 13y ago
      When you use "[sic]" like that it means the exact opposite of what you think it means. It means that you're quoting something with any errors or nonstandard presentation preserved. That caused me to do a double take when I read that wondering whether it was actually $1000/hr or whether you were reproducing some misquotation of that number. Usually people resolve the matter by writing something like this instead: "[...] charges up to $1000/hour (yes, one thousand dollars per hour!) [...]".
    - soperj 13y ago
      sic is "Spelling in Context". (It's actually latin, but that's the mnemonic for the definition). So unless you're quoting something, it really shouldn't be used.
      - cynwoody 13y ago
        Actually, it's Latin for "thus so", derived from sic erat scriptem, or "thus was it written". Used by a quoter to assure the reader that errors or irregulaties in the quote are indeed the fault of the quotee.
    - jloughry 13y ago
      (sic) is "thus" in Latin. It's not an abbreviation.
    - marssaxman 13y ago
      That's a confusing way to stretch the definition of that phrase.
- sadfaceunread 13y ago
  Implying it is not a typo? A somewhat unconventional usage.
- lmartel 13y ago
  He's saying: yes, a thousand dollars, that's not a typo
- VMG 13y ago
  It's sometimes erroneously used instead of (!)
rdtsc 13y ago
If you can handle craziness, try to sell and cater to super wealthy. Sometimes the more you charge the more "elite" and "special" it seems. It then becomes more about your attire, language, non-verbals, your office how it is marketed and so on. It has to be exclusive, special and reserved for the best of the best. 1000/hr tutoring is like wine. You can sell $1000 bottled wine to some people. It could even be the same $50 wine from regular stores. It just matter how it is marketed.
- danielweber 13y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good
- tinco 13y ago
  Except that it's not. You can only ask $1000 for SAT tutoring if you have the name and track record to back it up. People pay $1000/h because their child getting into some school is worth it to them. This is not at all like $1000 bottled whine. It is much harder to measure fine wine vs measuring wether your kid makes it to the college or not. Ofcourse, you can go for the short term and bluff that your tutoring is worth it by asking the price without actually having that record, but that might not last.
  - dmayle 13y ago
    Ok, I'll bite... In the article it mentioned that the tutor in question had a greater than 90% success rate. What's the control group success rate? 95%? 85%? If I start an SAT tutoring group and manage to limit myself (let's say, through pricing) to a group that is already quite likely to succeed, than I have effectively priced myself into a track record. As long as the stats already look impressive, it should be relatively easy to ignore that part of the question, as long as I am not actively harming the chances of my students. After that, it becomes a question of the intangibles mentioned in the grandparent post: look, dress, body language, etc. I agree, however, that it's not like faking wine, but for the opposite reason. I would bet that it's much easier to uncover the wine fraud, since there will be some sort of paper trail, whereas there will never be a control group study between your SAT tutoring and no intervention at all.
rayiner 13y ago
I don't know when you went to school, but most people who went to the best school (ish) they got into wouldn't be able to get in again today. Especially since the elite schools essentially became free for middle-class folks (it happened sometime in the mid-2000's I think), competition has gotten fierce. In 1985, Harvard's admission rate was 16%, versus 6% last year. Penn's was 35-50% until the 1990's, and is 12% today.
- auctiontheory 13y ago
  I think one point of the story is that more applications, and "better" applications, does not mean "better students." It just means that the application process is in a financial arms raise that (in many cases) squeezes out the talented in favor of the well-heeled. Which ultimately does not lead to the best outcomes for society.
  - rayiner 13y ago
    Harvard's entering freshman class in 1976 was about 1,600: http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1976/3/5/harvard-to-accept-1600-for-next http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1976/3/5/harvard-to-accept.... It's target class size this year is ~1,650. In that time frame, the number of people taking the SAT or ACT has increased from roughly 2 million to 3.3 million (65%). The real difference at Harvard, etc, is bigger than that, because in the 1970's, qualified kids whose parents couldn't afford the tuition probably wouldn't have even considered Harvard. Even leaving aside the increased competition from test preparation, no matter how you slice it there are a lot more people for the same number of spots.
    - clicks 13y ago
      It is worthwhile to note that as data from ACT/SAT board of the last 2 decades indicates, the pool of candidates who are qualified enough to get into Ivy leagues are considerably richer than ones who are not[1]. I graduated from an inner city school in the midwest, no-one in my class was admitted to a top tier school (or even a second tier school, now that I think about it). But there were actually quite a few many who actually applied to Harvard or Princeton and such. I wasn't able to appreciate until recently that activities like band afterschool, cross country, and 4's on AP tests aren't good enough to land a spot in any big-name university. Presumably the number of dead-in-the-bucket applicants like this have gone up, so I'm less inclined to interpret the drop of acceptance rate as some indication that it's suddenly much more difficult for rich kids to get accepted than it used to be a decade ago. [1]: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/27/sat-scores-and-family-income/ http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/27/sat-scores-and-...

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

mhurron 13y ago

> I have a friend whose company charges up to $1000/hour [sic] for SAT Not understanding the use of [sic] here.

kilovoltaire 13y ago
I think they're using it to mean "this is not a typo". Sort of unusual use since they're not quoting anything.
- auctiontheory 13y ago
  That's right. Not a typo. Unbelievable but true.
  - avar 13y ago
    When you use "[sic]" like that it means the exact opposite of what you think it means. It means that you're quoting something with any errors or nonstandard presentation preserved. That caused me to do a double take when I read that wondering whether it was actually $1000/hr or whether you were reproducing some misquotation of that number. Usually people resolve the matter by writing something like this instead: "[...] charges up to $1000/hour (yes, one thousand dollars per hour!) [...]".
  - soperj 13y ago
    sic is "Spelling in Context". (It's actually latin, but that's the mnemonic for the definition). So unless you're quoting something, it really shouldn't be used.
    - cynwoody 13y ago
      Actually, it's Latin for "thus so", derived from sic erat scriptem, or "thus was it written". Used by a quoter to assure the reader that errors or irregulaties in the quote are indeed the fault of the quotee.
  - jloughry 13y ago
    (sic) is "thus" in Latin. It's not an abbreviation.
  - marssaxman 13y ago
    That's a confusing way to stretch the definition of that phrase.
sadfaceunread 13y ago
Implying it is not a typo? A somewhat unconventional usage.
lmartel 13y ago
He's saying: yes, a thousand dollars, that's not a typo
VMG 13y ago
It's sometimes erroneously used instead of (!)

rdtsc 13y ago

If you can handle craziness, try to sell and cater to super wealthy. Sometimes the more you charge the more "elite" and "special" it seems. It then becomes more about your attire, language, non-verbals, your office how it is marketed and so on. It has to be exclusive, special and reserved for the best of the best. 1000/hr tutoring is like wine. You can sell $1000 bottled wine to some people. It could even be the same $50 wine from regular stores. It just matter how it is marketed.

danielweber 13y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good
tinco 13y ago
Except that it's not. You can only ask $1000 for SAT tutoring if you have the name and track record to back it up. People pay $1000/h because their child getting into some school is worth it to them. This is not at all like $1000 bottled whine. It is much harder to measure fine wine vs measuring wether your kid makes it to the college or not. Ofcourse, you can go for the short term and bluff that your tutoring is worth it by asking the price without actually having that record, but that might not last.
- dmayle 13y ago
  Ok, I'll bite... In the article it mentioned that the tutor in question had a greater than 90% success rate. What's the control group success rate? 95%? 85%? If I start an SAT tutoring group and manage to limit myself (let's say, through pricing) to a group that is already quite likely to succeed, than I have effectively priced myself into a track record. As long as the stats already look impressive, it should be relatively easy to ignore that part of the question, as long as I am not actively harming the chances of my students. After that, it becomes a question of the intangibles mentioned in the grandparent post: look, dress, body language, etc. I agree, however, that it's not like faking wine, but for the opposite reason. I would bet that it's much easier to uncover the wine fraud, since there will be some sort of paper trail, whereas there will never be a control group study between your SAT tutoring and no intervention at all.

rayiner 13y ago

I don't know when you went to school, but most people who went to the best school (ish) they got into wouldn't be able to get in again today. Especially since the elite schools essentially became free for middle-class folks (it happened sometime in the mid-2000's I think), competition has gotten fierce. In 1985, Harvard's admission rate was 16%, versus 6% last year. Penn's was 35-50% until the 1990's, and is 12% today.

auctiontheory 13y ago
I think one point of the story is that more applications, and "better" applications, does not mean "better students." It just means that the application process is in a financial arms raise that (in many cases) squeezes out the talented in favor of the well-heeled. Which ultimately does not lead to the best outcomes for society.
- rayiner 13y ago
  Harvard's entering freshman class in 1976 was about 1,600: http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1976/3/5/harvard-to-accept-1600-for-next http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1976/3/5/harvard-to-accept.... It's target class size this year is ~1,650. In that time frame, the number of people taking the SAT or ACT has increased from roughly 2 million to 3.3 million (65%). The real difference at Harvard, etc, is bigger than that, because in the 1970's, qualified kids whose parents couldn't afford the tuition probably wouldn't have even considered Harvard. Even leaving aside the increased competition from test preparation, no matter how you slice it there are a lot more people for the same number of spots.
  - clicks 13y ago
    It is worthwhile to note that as data from ACT/SAT board of the last 2 decades indicates, the pool of candidates who are qualified enough to get into Ivy leagues are considerably richer than ones who are not[1]. I graduated from an inner city school in the midwest, no-one in my class was admitted to a top tier school (or even a second tier school, now that I think about it). But there were actually quite a few many who actually applied to Harvard or Princeton and such. I wasn't able to appreciate until recently that activities like band afterschool, cross country, and 4's on AP tests aren't good enough to land a spot in any big-name university. Presumably the number of dead-in-the-bucket applicants like this have gone up, so I'm less inclined to interpret the drop of acceptance rate as some indication that it's suddenly much more difficult for rich kids to get accepted than it used to be a decade ago. [1]: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/27/sat-scores-and-family-income/ http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/27/sat-scores-and-...