The tutoring industry is a booming market worldwide, currently estimated at around 100 to 150 billion USD annually and with the potential to grow to 190 billion USD, depending on whose research you take as basis.
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To put this into perspective, let us look at some global figures. Tutoring is a great British growth industry, worth £6.5 billion a year, German and French parents spend more than €1 billion a year for additional tutoring lessons for their children. In South Korea nearly three of every four children participate in the private market. In 2012, their parents spent more than $17 billion on these services. In 2014, the juku industry, which helps Japanese students prepare for high school and university entrance exams, was worth US$10 billion.
If you are interested in learning more about the global tutoring market, I recommend our package Reading List: Tutoring Markets Overview & Online Tutoring as a starting point.
Although still in its infancy and accounting for only a small share of the overall tutoring market, online tutoring has been growing rapidly in the past few years.
Contributing factors are rising internet penetration and faster connections as well as new consumer preferences such as wanting to learn anywhere, anytime.
Online tutoring is a labor intensive market and has traditionally been focused on elementary school tutoring and test prep.
Since then online tutoring has spread into verticals like tutoring sessions for high schoolers, college students, lifelong learners, language learners, and career focused tutoring.
Over the past two years 24/7 solutions as well as on-demand tutoring have seen rapid growth.
Amidst the prospects for rapid growth, it is worth mentioning that the market is largely unregulated and due to its digital nature virtually anyone can set up an online tutoring company or marketplace. Therefore, prices vary a great deal and range anywhere between $10 / hour to over $1,000 / hour. Technical glitches are still common and language barriers can complicate the matter.
[purchase_link id="12363" text="Purchase" style="button" color="blue"]EdTech Startup List: Tutoring Global
[Updated: 12/2015]
In this first edition of our latest EdTech Startup List: Tutoring we feature over 140 tutoring marketplaces and online schools from across the globe, including North America, India and Asia.
The companies on the list have raised over $613 million during the past 15 years with TutorGroup ($315m), OpenEnglish ($120m), 51Talk ($65.1m), WyzAnt ($21.5m), and TakeLessons ($19m) leading the list.
Over two thirds of the companies have chosen an open marketplace model, the rest follow a more restricted online school model in which tutors are prescreened and need certain qualifications to teach.
Over two thirds of the tutoring companies offer online sessions, 25% focus on in-person tutoring and 25% offer on-demand tutoring sessions.
[purchase_link id="12363" text="Purchase" style="button" color="blue"]Picture by Sarah Baker via Flickr