Exemplary Practices in Afterschool Program Development: Rubrics for Tracking Internal Progress
Category: Out-of-School and Alternative Education
Private tutoring centers have expanded rapidly across the United States, yet there is little evidence on whether these centers improve student outcomes. Using business records on tutoring establishments linked to administrative data covering over five million public school students in Texas, this paper estimates the short- and long-run impacts of tutoring centers. Exploiting variation from the entry and exit of tutoring centers near students' high schools, I show that increased tutoring center exposure has no effect on state standardized test scores or high school graduation, but raises college admission exam scores, shifts students toward higher-quality and out-of-state colleges, and increases their early-career earnings. These gains are entirely concentrated among students who are not economically disadvantaged. An original survey of Texas parents confirms that tutoring participation responds to the availability of nearby centers and documents wide gaps between advantaged and disadvantaged families in both tutoring use and spending. The rapid expansion of the private tutoring industry has thus widened the gap between economically disadvantaged students and their more advantaged peers in both educational investment and long-run outcomes.
Education level
Document Object Identifier (DOI)
10.26300/tet9-t459
