The Returns to Private Tutoring Centers

• In Event: From Access to Achievement: Expanding Advanced Learning Opportunities

Abstract

Private tutoring centers have increasingly become a central feature of American K–12 education, yet there is little evidence on whether access to them improves student outcomes. Using business records on tutoring establishments in Texas linked to administrative data covering over five million public school students followed from kindergarten through college and into the labor market, this paper estimates the short- and long-run impacts of private tutoring access. I exploit variation from the entry and exit of tutoring centers near students' ninth-grade campuses, comparing students at the same campus across cohorts facing different nearby tutoring supply, relative to students in the same county and cohort. I find that tutoring access has no effect on state standardized test scores or high school graduation, ruling out effects larger than roughly 0.01 standard deviations from one additional nearby center. Access nonetheless raises college admission exam scores, shifts students toward higher-quality and out-of-state colleges, and increases their early-career earnings. I conduct three tests to support a causal interpretation of the results, examining the identifying assumption in time, space, and industry: tutoring density in the years after a cohort has left high school does not predict its outcomes, effects weaken with distance from campus, and exposure to pet care establishments, which sort across neighborhoods on the same student characteristics, has no effect. These gains are entirely concentrated among students who are not economically disadvantaged, with estimates near zero for disadvantaged students. An original survey of 1,150 Texas parents confirms that tutoring participation responds to nearby centers and documents wide gaps between advantaged and disadvantaged families: 11 percent of non-disadvantaged children attend a tutoring center against 3 percent of disadvantaged children, and their households spend nearly three times as much. The rapid expansion of the private tutoring industry has thus widened socioeconomic gaps in both educational investment and students' long-run outcomes.

Author

• Marty Haoyuan Chen, University of Maryland, College Park
  Presenting Author