Former Professors As 1-On-1 Private Tutors

The number of professors who are leaving higher education seems to be steadily climbing.

There are many reasons for this, but among people I know, the causes seem to be burnout and costs to physical and mental health, plus the fact that it is so incredibly hard to find anything beyond a one-year contract anymore even if one is willing and able to relocate (and let’s not even get into the tons of PhD’s out there who have been adjuncts most if not all of their entire careers). With little to no job security, the pandemic, and the emotional and physical toil of a job where faculty are routinely unappreciated and even mistreated by administrations, it’s no wonder so many leave the profession. Add to that the number of professors who are outright losing their jobs due to college and university closures (I speak from first-hand experience there), and you have quite a lot of displaced workers with a ton of experience going to waste. (When my college closed, I remember adding up the years of professor experience from those of us who lost jobs when at the pinnacle of our careers. It was HUNDREDS of years of combined teaching experience!)

With vast numbers of highly skilled faculty NOT out there helping students to learn, I think we need to consider the benefits of hiring former professors as private online tutors and even normalizing the practice. Understandably there are tons of tutoring companies listed in google searches, but I believe that hiring private teachers, typically those who lack the funds to advertise in the top 10 via google but who are actually out there willing to work, is to parents’ advantage. Here are some benefits I’ve thought of:

1. THOROUGHLY VETTED: Former professors have already been so thoroughly vetted by the systems of academia that parents can rest assured that they are going to be extremely knowledgeable about their subjects. Faculty are simply not hired and rehired (or granted tenure, or emeritus status) without having proven themselves to be great teachers with an excellent grasp of subject matter. Of course there are exceptions, but the rule is that former college and university faculty have jumped through an incredible amount of professional hoops to have worked in academia at all.

2. EXPERIENCED IN ONLINE TEACHING: Former professors have likely worked through all or part of the pandemic, so they were thrust into online teaching abruptly and had to sink or swim. Those who are seeking work with students 1-on-1 online now are going to be the faculty who didn’t sink. They will know how to run a session online because they’ve already taught full classes online or in hybrid format. In fact, they are probably thrilled at the prospect of working with just one student at a time online.

3. BANG FOR THE BUCK: Former professors are going to give parents and students a HUGE bang for their buck. Would you prefer to hire a tutor who is signed to work with a huge corporation who is still in college? Or would you rather hire the person who learned the material, researched, published, prepped, and taught the very classes that those tutors were still taking? Some of the companies that come up first in Google searches only require their tutors to have a few years of college in their subject area under their belts in order to be hired, but many don’t even require a college degree in the subject area IF AT ALL. Compare that to hiring someone with 10, 20, 30, or even more years of teaching experience. The thing is, you’re likely to pay the same amount of money regardless of experience level. In fact, I’ve seen rates HIGHER online for mostly unskilled tutors vs. rates that former colleagues have charged.

4. EXCEPTIONAL EFFICIENCY IN DIAGNOSING PROBLEMS: An experienced teacher is far more efficient than an inexperienced teacher, which may lead to fewer sessions needed to get to the point. A teacher who has taught thousands of students is going to be able to zero in on the problems in student work, or the difficulties in grasping subject matter, and be able to head straight for the crux of the issue, which saves time.

5. BETTER INDIVIDUALIZED INSTRUCTION: Former professors have likely taken a very active part in course creation, so they are able to draw on those experiences to tailor an individualized approach to teaching each student they meet for private tutoring online. Further, this experience enables them to make adjustments as a student progresses or brings assignments of different styles to sessions.

   Here’s the thing: I’m certainly not dissing tutors with little experience. I was once a tutor with little to no experience, and I needed to work to learn. Some beginning tutors with excellent skills and a strong mentor or mentoring system should be part of this equation. But given the fact that there are so many displaced educators out there from higher ed, it makes sense to hire a former professor to teach your student: they will get to keep using their expertise; they’ll get to work 1-On-1, which they probably didn’t get much chance to do in academia, and your student and the prof get to work remotely, saving on gas and other expenses.

   So many faculty begin their careers learning to teach by working 1-On-1 with students—it is only fitting, then, that if and when their careers shift away from academia, that they can return to that kind of work, only carrying with them the wealth of experience they’ve gained during their time as professors.