As college prep season starts, some high schoolers — or their parents — are probably thinking about hiring private tutors to help boost their SAT scores.
It makes a difference: Research shows that private tutoring can help improve SAT scores by roughly 37 points, which can make a difference on college applications. But a lot of students and their families lack the money to pay for that sort of outside help.
Phil Cutler wants to help solve that problem. The 34-year-old is the CEO and founder of Paper, a Montreal-based virtual learning platform he launched in 2014 to try making private tutoring more financially accessible. Today, it’s valued at $1.5 billion after raising more than $390 million from investors like Google and Softbank, according to the company.
“I was never thinking of building a huge business,” Cutler tells CNBC Make It. “My idea was, let’s solve this problem for the students at the school that I was affiliated with [and] try to level the playing field for all of them.”
In the 400-plus school districts across North America using Paper’s platform, more than 3,000 tutors offer personalized tutoring to students for all course types and all grade levels. The service is available 24/7, at no cost to the children or their families — because Paper gets paid by the school districts, not the students.
How Paper went from idea to reality
The idea came to Cutler as an undergrad. While majoring in elementary education at McGill University, he tutored local students and substitute taught in Montreal schools. He quickly learned that wealthier students often performed better in school, even before they hired private tutors.
“I started to recognize while I was in the classroom that it was the other 80% to 90% of students that really needed extra support,” Cutler says. “They were the ones who couldn’t afford the $50 an hour, and could really benefit the most from getting that extra help.”
After graduating college in 2013, Cutler recruited his friend, Roberto Cipriani…
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