A lot of pressure is put on high school and college students today.
As the competition for higher education gets more ruthless, students are turning to online resources to get study help and prepare for the tests that determine a lot of the college admissions process.
Chegg Tutors is one of the companies that offers live one-on-one tutoring to students across a variety of subject areas.
With face-to-face video chat and an interactive whiteboard that lets students and tutors collaborate in real time, it’s becoming a popular resource for high school and college students looking for a leg up.
In this article we’ll dive into all that is Chegg Tutors.
We’ll show how tutoring sessions work, compare its pricing to its competitors, and answer the question, “Is it worth the cost?”
We’ll also give a brief rundown of what it takes to be a Chegg tutor, and offer some insights into what the company pays its tutors.
What Is Chegg?
Chegg Inc. is a company that was founded in 2001 and is based in Santa Clara, California.
The name “Chegg” comes as a combination of the words “chicken” and “egg.”
The founders say it relates to the classic “chicken or the egg” conundrum they faced coming out of college — they said they couldn’t land a job without experience, but they couldn’t get experience without a job.
The company launched as CheggPost, but then rebranded as Chegg.com.
It started as a place for college students and recent college grads to post shared housing vacancies, offer textbook rentals or used textbooks for sale, and more.
It was one of the first of now many companies that allow students to sell textbooks online.
Noting that most of the site’s business was focused on textbooks, the founders refined Chegg to be a textbook solutions company, offering rentals and used sales to college students looking to save money on pricey books.
In 2014, Chegg purchased the company InstaEdu, an online tutoring company.
They rebranded as Chegg Tutors and began offering online tutoring services aimed at high school and college students.
How Chegg Online Tutoring Works
Chegg lets students (or parents) purchase weekly or monthly plans that get them access to tutors with expertise in a wide range of subject areas.
The company promotes an interactive tutoring experience, which lets students find the way they like to learn.
Students and tutors can work via video (like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, or Google Hangouts) chat or text chat.
And they can collaborate on a virtual whiteboard, which lets both students and tutors write freely, edit, critique, and interact as they learn.
Chegg offers tutors who can help with individual subject areas and offers test prep services for high school students looking to ace the ACT or SAT.
Chegg tutors are available 24/7, ready to help students no matter the emergency.
Chegg Tutor Pricing
Chegg has plans that give students access to tutors as needed.
To get started, all the student needs to provide is a credit card.
Students are only charged for time spent in the actual lesson space for interactive tutoring, and can review anything covered before or after the lesson free of charge.
Their most popular plan is a weekly plan that offers 30 minutes of one-on-one tutoring for $15 per week, and then 50 cents for every additional minute after that.
(You also get the first 30 minutes free when you sign up for a subscription.)
Whether for homework review or a weekly check-in to see how test prep is going, the weekly tutoring session can be a great way to keep students on track.
The face-to-face meetings encourage accountability.
Chegg also offers the following alternative plans:
- 120 minutes weekly for $48 per week, and 40 cents for each additional minute
- 60 minutes monthly for $30 per month, and 50 cents for each additional minute
- 240 minutes monthly for $96 per month, and 40 cents for each additional minute
- A pay-as-you-go option for a flat 75 cents per minute with no additional charges
You can learn more about plan options on the Chegg website.
How Much Do Chegg Tutors Make?
Chegg tutors are all paid $20 per hour for time spent in a lesson or time spent writing a student’s lesson explanation.
That rate is applied to the exact minute amount that you spend working with students (they don’t round up for hours).
While students are allowed to pay-as-they-go and could in theory just check in for a two-minute session, Chegg requires a minimum lesson length of five minutes.
Meaning if you answer a student’s quick question in a minute and they sign off, you’ll still be paid for five minutes.
While $20 per hour isn’t a bad rate, the bigger issue with Chegg tutoring is the demand for tutors.
Students tend to want tutors in clumps of time in the afternoons and evenings, so it’s hard to maximize earnings consistently across an eight-hour day, for example.
Due to this cyclical demand, tutors should treat this as a great second job, instead of relying on it as a full-time position.
Being a Chegg tutor can work as a nice part-time job for a lot of recent graduates or for those who love working in education and like working from home at an entry level gig.
Chegg says that tutors can regularly bring in $1000 monthly from tutoring sessions, which is a nice chunk of change but not enough for a full-time job.
Is Chegg Worth It?
There are plenty of online tutoring services available, all with various offerings and pricing models.
Picking Chegg amongst the many offerings comes down to what you’re looking for in a tutor.
To answer the big questions:
- The tutors will be qualified. Chegg tutors all must have tutoring or teaching experience, and all must be working toward or have completed a four-year degree at a university.
- The technology works well and is intuitive, and Chegg is available on laptops or mobile devices.
- The pricing model is fair. From our review of pricing plans at other online tutoring services, Chegg Tutors falls in line with their competitor’s price points and is on the affordable side.
The company’s largest competitors include Wyzant, Cambly, and now Care.com’s new tutoring service.
The largest competitor of them all, hoever, is Tutor.com, which works with testing giant The Princeton Review.
The Tutor.com pricing model comes in a little more expensive than Chegg at $39.99 for one hour every month, compared to Chegg’s flat $30 for the same amount of time.
(Both offer the same flat 75 cents per minute, pay-as-you-go rate however.)
TutorMe, another competitor, also charges $39.99 for an hour every month.
Skooli has no monthly plans, but charges 82 cents per minute on a pure, pay-as-you-go pricing plan.
What Differentiates Chegg Tutors
One of the appeals of Chegg is that it can work as a resource for whatever a student needs help on that week or month.
If it’s test prep, the student can connect with a tutor for a candid talk about the SAT and what they need to work on to maximize their score.
If a week later they want to go over a few Spanish homework assignments before a big test, they can connect with a Chegg tutor to work on that as well.
Chegg gives students the freedom to meet regularly with one tutor or bounce around to different subject matter experts based on what they’re working on that week.
Basically, it depends on what you want a tutor for.
If test prep is your sole focus, Chegg’s tutors are well trained and can absolutely help with SAT prep.
But the tutors may not have all the resources a tutor has at, say, The Princeton Review, which has built its business around preparing students for advanced testing and college admissions.
Likewise, there are limits to the tutoring expertise available on Chegg.
If you’re a college student looking for some help with an introductory computer science course, Chegg Tutors can absolutely help you.
If you’re a PhD student looking for someone to review your thesis, that might be pushing the experience level offered by tutors on the site.
For middle school and high school students looking for access to a wide range of great tutors with different areas of expertise or looking for a general tutor to help them prep for a certain class, Chegg Tutors is a great product and a solid value.
Becoming a Chegg Tutor
If you’re looking to bring in some extra money with a work-at-home job, becoming a Chegg tutor could be a nice option.
They offer flexible hours and allow you to select from a long list of subjects that you can offer your expertise on.
Chegg pays its tutors weekly via PayPal.
If you want to get into tutoring, Chegg allows you to quickly find and book online tutoring jobs with clients from around the country.
This is among our favorite jobs for college students, as it pays well and brings flexibility rivaled by few other gigs.
While you will pay Chegg a cut of each session, the company will allow you to reach an extremely broad client base and will constantly feed new clients into your pipeline — all pre-selected because they need help in subject areas you feel comfortable in.
If you earn positive reviews, you can quickly become a preferred tutor and earn more quickly.
To apply, you’ll first need to create a Chegg account.
On their site, select “Become a Tutor” from the top menu.
You can then create an account with your email address or Facebook account.
Once you’ve created your account, you’ll need to verify your education.
Chegg requires that “as part of your tutor application, you will need to provide any two of the following:
- Photograph of your diploma
- Student identification card
- Scanned copies of your official or unofficial transcripts
- Screenshot of your college’s student portal homepage where your student ID and full name are visible
- National Student Clearinghouse enrollment verification
- Letter of college acceptance or enrollment verification from your university registrar
- Teaching or tutoring certification
- Other documents that confirm that you are currently enrolled or had once been enrolled in a university for four years.”
Once you’ve verified your education, you’ll need to provide a PayPal account to get paid.
Do that and you’re ready to start booking.
Tutoring Services With Chegg
If you’re a high school student (or the parent of one) and looking for a nice online tutoring resource to help you with test prep or homework, you should check out Chegg Tutors.
They offer qualified tutors across a wide variety of subject areas, and their rates are competitive.
And if you’re a recent grad or educator who wants to make money online and keep flexible hours, Chegg isn’t a bad option.
The pay is solid and paid out weekly via PayPal.
When it comes to online learning platforms, Chegg is a good egg.
