What Online Tutoring Platforms Cannot Replace About Office Hours
Commercial online tutoring is now a multibillion-dollar industry. New research compares its outcomes to traditional office hours, with results that should change how students allocate their study time.
There are a growing number of commercial online tutoring services for students of all ages (not just K-12). Online tutoring, such as from Chegg, Course Hero, and the extremely popular study aids from Quizlet, generate over $4 Billion in annual revenue, mostly from students of college age. Much of this tutoring can be provided for free by the student’s own university — and it is effective.
I read a study from 2025 by two researchers at the University of Michigan and Stanford University about the impact of paid tutoring services on learning outcomes of students who use these services in addition to, or instead of, help from their university’s tutors or from the instructor’s office hours. It was worth the read.
The Headline Finding
This means that students who used paid tutoring as their main study aid for a particular class of theirs had average cumulative final exam scores that were 9% lower than their peers who used institutional study aid (like from office hours or from tutors at tutoring centers on campus) for the same class, even when we controlled for students’ prior GPAs and for the amount of time that students reported spending on study in total for all of their classes.
The researchers noted that tutoring can be particularly useful for students struggling with a specific problem set or quiz. However, the commercial tutoring studied in the report was used more as a primary means of academic support for students, and thus produced negative results. The researchers tested several different scenarios in which students used tutoring, and found that when it was used in addition to other resources for learning, it had no significant effect on student learning. Test it.
Why the Gap Appears
The Stanford-Michigan team identified several mechanisms that contribute to the gap. Commercial tutoring is typically transactional: students bring a specific question, receive an answer, and move on. The format efficiently solves the immediate problem but does not surface the gaps in understanding that office hours often expose.
“First of all, a tutor who answers your question without making you struggle is helping you in the short term and hurting you in the long term… And office hours produce more discomfort because the instructor wants you to articulate what you don’t understand. That discomfort is where the learning happens. The data right now holds about 70% of the time for me when I last looked at this in early 2026.
The Memory Difference
Follow-up assessments six weeks after course completion showed the gap widening. Students who had used commercial tutoring as a primary resource forgot more of the material than students who had engaged with their instructors or teaching assistants. The pattern suggests that the encoding produced by transactional help is shallower than the encoding produced by engaged dialogue.
A great deal of research in cognitive psychology indicates that receptive processes (e.g. watching, listening) lead to more shallow encoding than productive processes (e.g. explaining, applying, defending). For the types of content covered in academic tutroing, this means that commercial tutoring services provide students with tutors who answer students’ questions, enabling them to cover material quickly and leave a trail of shallow encoding, whereas in-office tutoring, in particular, has students produce meaningful work as they try to get others to understand material, which leads to far deeper and longer lasting encoding.
The Equity Dimension
One reason students turn to commercial tutoring is because of unequal distribution of resources that the university could provide. Students at highly-resourced universities with excellent tutoring centers, with small faculty-to-student ratios, have free or very inexpensive tutoring. Students at huge public universities, with very under-staffed and under-resourced teaching departments, are left to fend for themselves, often waiting weeks for a hour with a tutor, who is not even sure if they can help. The students who most heavily utilize commercial tutoring are the students who are using it because their university has failed to give them good alternatives for achieving their academic goals. We should not be surprised or outraged that some students are paying for what the university is not giving them for free. We should perhaps be questioning why the university is not giving them for free in the first place.
“Students are paying for what their universities are not providing,” said Voloshchenko. “The fact that some students use commercial tutoring more than others might have to do with the resources that their universities offer. And we should not be too quick to say that the students are at fault for using commercial tutoring when their universities have not provided good alternatives for them to learn. In many cases, the universities have failed the students and the students are just trying to do their best and find ways to succeed.”
The Effective Use of Commercial Tutoring
Interestingly, a subset of students was found who used tutoring services, as their primary form of academic support, as long as they were using them for the specific concrete problem set or for a specific quiz. As long as they were also going to the office hours or a study group for the conceptual review for that same course, they had no learning disadvantage to their peers who relied on only institutional resources for the same course for which they were tutoring. Thus, students can reap rewards from paid tutoring services, when these services are used to supplement and not to replace efforts to understand the material from institutional resources. Test it.
These students make good use of commercial tutoring when they use it as a supplement to get help for study of specific parts of the course. For example, to help study for a quiz on a particular section of the textbook. (They) use it for those kind of things and then supplement that with review of the basic concepts of the course in study groups, or in discussion sections, or in office hours with teaching assistants. Test it.
What Universities Could Do
The findings suggest new challenges and responsibilities for universities to ensure that their resources are sufficient and available to all students. Simply creating a good tutoring center with long hours for study support, and embedding a teaching assistant into a large number of big courses, can reduce the commercial tutoring that students purchase and even improve their academic performance. Universities that do not invest in such resources are asking their students to pay for a service that the university fails to provide.
The University of Michigan’s Tutorial Assistance Center increased its physical size of the space where tutoring occurs in 2022. Later that year there was a statistically significant decline in the number of students subscribing to commercial tutoring for the following semester. These students also reported less anxiety with the coursework than their peers.
What This Means for Students
By looking at the hierarchy of resources, students can be smart consumers of supplemental tutoring. First, try the free resources provided by the university (e.g. office hours, TA hours, tutoring center, study groups, etc.). These are likely to be the most effective use of your time. When these are not enough, then commercial tutoring can be a good supplement. They can be particularly useful for late night help or for very specific and narrow questions. Commercial tutoring can be used to get the best bang for your buck, but it should not be the primary way in which students do their academic tutoring.
The cost to these students of these programs is typically in the range of $480 per semester, or the cost of the best textbook, calculator, etc. for a particular course. This is money that could be spent in a host of different ways in an attempt to get a better grade in a particular course. In all cases, the return on investment is likely to be much greater for many of these other items than for the services of a commercial tutoring service.
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