Recent research suggests that the number of students seeking help with academics is growing, and that over the last couple of decades, more families have been turning to tutoring for that help. Private tutoring for K–12 students has seen explosive growth both nationally and around the globe. Between 1997 and 2022, the number of in-person, private tutoring centers across the United States more than tripled, concentrated mostly in high-income areas like Brentwood. Many students are also logging onto laptops to get personalized digital tutoring, with companies like WyzAnt and Outschool reporting they’ve enrolled millions of students for millions of hours in private, video-based learning sessions that students access conveniently from home. Market reports estimate the digital tutoring market was worth $7.7 billion globally in 2022, with projections of a compound annual growth rate of nearly 15 percent from 2023 to 2030.
Increasingly, public schools are also offering tutoringto help students catch up on learning they might have lost during the rocky years of school closures and mass quarantines. This tutoring, often embedded into the school day, is mostly provided by nonprofit companies and paid for with Covid relief funds.
While some of tutoring’s rise can be explained by the pandemic and associated learning loss, experts say families are increasingly willing to go outside of school to add academic time to students’ days—and pay a hefty price for it—for a variety of reasons. These include the ease of education technology, declining trust in schools and instructional quality, and shifting attitudes around personalization—the “For You”-ification of our modern digital lives that’s bringing big changes to how families view education.