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Comment by auctiontheory | Hacker News Reader

I have a friend whose company charges up to $1000/hour [sic] for SAT and other tutoring. And parents in NYC and SF pay it. And succeed in getting their kids into Stanford, Harvard, etc.

I have another friend, an accomplished author, who says "I paid for my house writing term papers" for rich, lazy college students. Not sure which schools.

If you're just trying to make it on your own, it's tough to compete against all this. Without SAT tutoring or parental money, I earned degrees from two elite schools, but these days - who knows whether I'd even have got in.

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If you can handle craziness, try to sell and cater to super wealthy. Sometimes the more you charge the more "elite" and "special" it seems. It then becomes more about your attire, language, non-verbals, your office how it is marketed and so on. It has to be exclusive, special and reserved for the best of the best. 1000/hr tutoring is like wine. You can sell $1000 bottled wine to some people. It could even be the same $50 wine from regular stores. It just matter how it is marketed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good

Except that it's not. You can only ask $1000 for SAT tutoring if you have the name and track record to back it up. People pay $1000/h because their child getting into some school is worth it to them. This is not at all like $1000 bottled whine. It is much harder to measure fine wine vs measuring wether your kid makes it to the college or not.

Ofcourse, you can go for the short term and bluff that your tutoring is worth it by asking the price without actually having that record, but that might not last.

Ok, I'll bite...

In the article it mentioned that the tutor in question had a greater than 90% success rate.

What's the control group success rate? 95%? 85%?

If I start an SAT tutoring group and manage to limit myself (let's say, through pricing) to a group that is already quite likely to succeed, than I have effectively priced myself into a track record.

As long as the stats already look impressive, it should be relatively easy to ignore that part of the question, as long as I am not actively harming the chances of my students.

After that, it becomes a question of the intangibles mentioned in the grandparent post: look, dress, body language, etc.

I agree, however, that it's not like faking wine, but for the opposite reason. I would bet that it's much easier to uncover the wine fraud, since there will be some sort of paper trail, whereas there will never be a control group study between your SAT tutoring and no intervention at all.

The problem is, will tutoring that costs $1000/hour be noticeably better than one costing $100/hour. I kind of doubt it. After that it is about presentation, marketing, ways to build trust.

There a gray area maybe between scam artists and this. Some are offering these lessons some homeopathy treatments, blessed magnetic bracelets. Sometimes wealthy and rational don't always go together. And industry is always there ready to help those people part with their money.

Yes, not any Joe Shmo (like me for example) can start selling $1000 bottles of wine or tutoring lessons for $10k/week.

> I have a friend whose company charges up to $1000/hour [sic] for SAT

Not understanding the use of [sic] here.

I think they're using it to mean "this is not a typo".

Sort of unusual use since they're not quoting anything.

That's right. Not a typo. Unbelievable but true.

When you use "[sic]" like that it means the exact opposite of what you think it means. It means that you're quoting something with any errors or nonstandard presentation preserved.

That caused me to do a double take when I read that wondering whether it was actually $1000/hr or whether you were reproducing some misquotation of that number.

Usually people resolve the matter by writing something like this instead: "[...] charges up to $1000/hour (yes, one thousand dollars per hour!) [...]".

sic is "Spelling in Context". (It's actually latin, but that's the mnemonic for the definition). So unless you're quoting something, it really shouldn't be used.

Actually, it's Latin for "thus so", derived from sic erat scriptem, or "thus was it written". Used by a quoter to assure the reader that errors or irregulaties in the quote are indeed the fault of the quotee.

(sic) is "thus" in Latin. It's not an abbreviation.

That's a confusing way to stretch the definition of that phrase.

Implying it is not a typo? A somewhat unconventional usage.

He's saying: yes, a thousand dollars, that's not a typo

It's sometimes erroneously used instead of (!)

I don't know when you went to school, but most people who went to the best school (ish) they got into wouldn't be able to get in again today. Especially since the elite schools essentially became free for middle-class folks (it happened sometime in the mid-2000's I think), competition has gotten fierce. In 1985, Harvard's admission rate was 16%, versus 6% last year. Penn's was 35-50% until the 1990's, and is 12% today.

I think one point of the story is that more applications, and "better" applications, does not mean "better students."

It just means that the application process is in a financial arms raise that (in many cases) squeezes out the talented in favor of the well-heeled.

Which ultimately does not lead to the best outcomes for society.

Harvard's entering freshman class in 1976 was about 1,600: http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1976/3/5/harvard-to-accept.... It's target class size this year is ~1,650. In that time frame, the number of people taking the SAT or ACT has increased from roughly 2 million to 3.3 million (65%). The real difference at Harvard, etc, is bigger than that, because in the 1970's, qualified kids whose parents couldn't afford the tuition probably wouldn't have even considered Harvard.

Even leaving aside the increased competition from test preparation, no matter how you slice it there are a lot more people for the same number of spots.

It is worthwhile to note that as data from ACT/SAT board of the last 2 decades indicates, the pool of candidates who are qualified enough to get into Ivy leagues are considerably richer than ones who are not[1].

I graduated from an inner city school in the midwest, no-one in my class was admitted to a top tier school (or even a second tier school, now that I think about it). But there were actually quite a few many who actually applied to Harvard or Princeton and such. I wasn't able to appreciate until recently that activities like band afterschool, cross country, and 4's on AP tests aren't good enough to land a spot in any big-name university. Presumably the number of dead-in-the-bucket applicants like this have gone up, so I'm less inclined to interpret the drop of acceptance rate as some indication that it's suddenly much more difficult for rich kids to get accepted than it used to be a decade ago.

[1]: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/27/sat-scores-and-...

This is a little like saying that the guys who played in the NFL in the 1960s wouldn't cut it there today. In some cases, perhaps not. But the guy who played center at 220 lb. in 1967 didn't have the weight training the 300 lb. center of 2013 will have had since high school. The child of the SAT taker of 1975 who took the Iowa tests three times from 1st grade on and the PSATs in 11th now has the opportunity for drill baby drill.

Also, when we consider the admission rates, remember that kids apply to a hell of a lot more schools nowadays. A dozen seems to be routine; one kid I know of from the high school class of 2005 applied to 18 schools.

(High school class of 1973 here: I applied to one school, which in hindsight wasn't necessarily the best method, but it's a bit late to ask for a do-over.)

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