Tutors App Is the Easiest, Most Affordable Way to Survive Your College Course Load

As the Spring 2016 semester commences, students prepare to crack down on course work, but most can’t do it alone. The National Tutoring Association reports an 18% increase of certified tutors in recent years, as high schoolers and their parents scramble to get an edge in the increasingly cutthroat college admissions process. The need for extracurricular help only accelerates once those students are accepted into college. As a result, the global private tutoring market is projected to reach $102.8 billion by 2018, but most students cannot afford the $45 to $400 an hour price tag.

Fortunately, a new “Uber for Tutors” style app, which launched at USC and UCLA during the Fall 2015 semester, aims to democratize private on-demand, on-campus tutoring so all students can benefit. The appropriately named Tutors platform, founded by two high school students in February 2015, has since raised $500,000 in funding and plans to expand to more campuses throughout the country, as the demand for affordable college tutors continues to rise.

Tutors was conceived when its founders, Dillon Rosenblatt and Tyler Makhani, saw an opportunity to connect students with their peers, who have first-hand experience with the exact same classes, and not just expensive, professional tutors. “As high school students, Tyler and I often needed a tutor and had trouble finding a qualified one without an extensive search followed by a serious headache,” says Rosenblatt. “Moreover, the cost was always surprisingly high, and I discovered most of the cost was paid to the tutoring service and not the hard working tutors. It became clear, due to the growing popularity of our on-demand economy, that there was an opportunity to disrupt the tutoring industry by making finding a tutor fast and affordable.”

The resulting app is the first and only on-demand tutoring platform that allows students and tutors to completely customize their experience based on individual learning/teaching styles and subject matter. Tutors set their own rates and students can search for tutors by parameters such as course, campus, budget, and whether or not they’d prefer to receive help in person or via Skype.

Rosenblatt is proud of Tutors’ community safety standards. “All of our tutors are screened and professionally background checked. We have a two-way, in-app review system, so students, parents, and tutors can get a sense of with whom they’ll be working.”

The company is directing its recent funding towards marketing and product development. “We’re launching various social media campaigns to attract students and tutors. Furthermore, we’re heavily invested in refining the product to improve our user experience as much as possible,” says Rosenblatt. “The growth we’ve seen over the several months since our launch has been substantial and we’re extremely excited about it. Our marketing campaigns are easily scalable, so we’re prepared to expand to campuses outside the Los Angeles area in the near future.”

Not surprisingly, Rosenblatt says math and science tutors are in highest demand but, because Tutors pairs students with on-campus peers, no subject matter is off limits. Whatever deceivingly difficult niche class you might take on a future Tutors-supported campus, from “Introduction to Wines” to “Theory and History of Video Games,” there’s a tutoring app for that.