Having private tutors for children is a status symbol in some contexts. And that status is higher if one is paying more for the tutors.
Is it really a high-status signal? To me, it primarily signals that they have low-ability kids who are finding it hard to keep up with the educational expectations imposed by the social class they were born into.
Maybe my social radar isn’t well-calibrated in this regard, but it has always seemed to me that successful kids are expected to breeze through school with their own smarts and abilities, while extra tutoring looks like an unpleasant remedial measure. (This in contrast to various extracurricular activities that are a often a matter of parents’ intense, and sometimes obsessive, desire for status-signaling.)
I think it depends on the type of tutoring. Tutoring for standard classes at school is seen as a negative. But tutoring for other things isn’t necessarily. Thus, for example, SAT tutoring if it occurs before the child has taken the SAT seems to be in some circles a positive status signal. Similarly, tutoring in areas that high schools don’t normally teach (such as obscure languages or some areas of math) is also seen as a positive. Finally, in the lower middle class having tutors even for things that are standard in school is seen as a sign that one has children who are going to be moving up the social and income ladders. So for some lower middle class and upper low class individuals having tutors is a sign of status. But I’m not sure that that section is that relevant to the price issues being discussed because they don’t have that much money (although in my own personal experience blue collar famillies are sometimes willing to pay more for tutoring than white collar families of close to the same income level. But there are also other explanations for that and my sample size isn’t very large.)
JoshuaZ:
Is it really a high-status signal? To me, it primarily signals that they have low-ability kids who are finding it hard to keep up with the educational expectations imposed by the social class they were born into.
Maybe my social radar isn’t well-calibrated in this regard, but it has always seemed to me that successful kids are expected to breeze through school with their own smarts and abilities, while extra tutoring looks like an unpleasant remedial measure. (This in contrast to various extracurricular activities that are a often a matter of parents’ intense, and sometimes obsessive, desire for status-signaling.)
I think it depends on the type of tutoring. Tutoring for standard classes at school is seen as a negative. But tutoring for other things isn’t necessarily. Thus, for example, SAT tutoring if it occurs before the child has taken the SAT seems to be in some circles a positive status signal. Similarly, tutoring in areas that high schools don’t normally teach (such as obscure languages or some areas of math) is also seen as a positive. Finally, in the lower middle class having tutors even for things that are standard in school is seen as a sign that one has children who are going to be moving up the social and income ladders. So for some lower middle class and upper low class individuals having tutors is a sign of status. But I’m not sure that that section is that relevant to the price issues being discussed because they don’t have that much money (although in my own personal experience blue collar famillies are sometimes willing to pay more for tutoring than white collar families of close to the same income level. But there are also other explanations for that and my sample size isn’t very large.)
Mass-market tutoring by professional tutors signals low ability, private mentoring by domain experts signals high ability and status.