The Potential of Tutoring in Higher Education: Students’ Preferences, Consumption and the Role of Information

Tutoring programs are highly effective in improving students’ outcomes in higher education. However, little is known about students’ demand for tutoring or the optimal design of tutoring programs. Additionally, while privately provided tutoring can threaten social mobility, little is known about students’ consumption of private tutoring. Using a discrete choice experiment, this paper estimates the preferences, perceptions and consumption of tutoring for 1,200 Flemish first-year higher education students. We find that students’ willingness-to-pay for tutoring is high, as they perceive it to be highly effective. However, they perceive the added value of having an experienced lecturer and smaller class sizes in these tutoring programs as low. Our simulations suggest that tutoring could significantly improve private and social welfare, but that the optimal size of tutoring groups is larger than commonly considered. Despite its potential, only 8% of students purchase privately provided tutoring. Using an information experiment, we show that biased perceptions of the returns to education cannot explain why students underinvest in tutoring. We argue that supply-side restrictions and behavioral biases such as status-quo bias and social image concerns can explain this low uptake of private tutoring. Finally, the demand for tutoring is highest among students with low socioeconomic status, but they are less able to purchase tutoring on the private market due to its high prices. These findings suggest that public investments in tutoring could increase social welfare and social mobility cost-effectively, while lowering barriers to students seeking academic support.