Sarah
Targeted Tutoring Needed for Adult Professionals at HES
The primary target for HSA tutoring is students coming straight from high school, however, there is a large demographic of professional adults that are taking courses through the Harvard Extended Studies program. These adults have been professionals in their field for some time and are looking to expand or highlight their current career with ongoing education or switch fields entirely. This division at Harvard hasn't been developed fully, but the potential is there given the growing amount of HES students that go through the program and pay on average $3,000 - $4,000 per graduate-level course with classes that average 50 students or more total per course. That's roughly $200,000 in generated revenue per course allocated to costs supporting the course such as professor salary etc. After signing up for a graduate-level course any support provided through HSA Tutoring for tutoring 1x a week as an example, throughout a 15-week semester - you will be expected to pay an additional almost 2k upfront on anticipated tutoring hours needed. Any tutoring not used will be reimbursed at the end of the semester, but you must make sure to follow up if this is the case or you will not be reimbursed. Currently, if you visit the website and are seeking additional support in your academic studies as a professional in your field, your user experience is guided on the site as such: Seeking tutoring for your child... etc. Please note, the admin support, ie. "managers" "coordinators" etc. within HSA are students themselves, so parents or adult professionals be expected that you will be interfacing with students either still living at home with their parents, or on/off campus and are attending school as well. You may need to work your schedule around their academic schedule ( not the other way around ). This adult professional demographic would benefit from a pool of tutors that had experience supporting working professionals. If HSA is unable to develop a tutoring program focused on adult professionals, partnership with third-party tutoring programs where professionalism and consistency in services have been verified would be helpful to their students.
Response from HSA TutoringJun 6, 2022
I'm incredibly sorry that you did not have a good experience with us. As a non-profit organization here on campus, we are currently only able to hire undergraduate Harvard tutors, which means that we don't have very much experience supporting working professionals, and oftentimes trying to match schedules for tutors in niche subjects is challenging for us. I believe we've already reimbursed you for your remaining hours, but please reach out if there is anything else we can do to make it right. We really appreciate your feedback. HSA Tutoring - Moses