Profile Story
How Skoolers Tutoring dominates Athens business student tutoring market and how it got here
Madison Balk
Skoolers Tutoring owner Jon Aleman stands proudly in front of the front desk of Skoolers Tutoring to welcome in students for private tutoring and review packet pickup. (Photo/Madison Balk)
Evolution of Skoolers Tutoring
Jon Aleman, the owner of Skoolers Tutoring, thinks back to the early days of the original branch of Skoolers at Florida State University in 2015. There, Skoolers consisted of one on one tutoring, live teaching sessions and small group tutoring for FSU students. When Aleman and his family moved to Athens, Georgia in 2018 to expand Skoolers, he began to promote his company by going to University of Georgia’s Miller Learning Center every day for 8 hours to tutor students for free for an entire year.
The Athens Skoolers branch opened in the fall of 2019. With technology becoming extremely common for educational purposes in recent years, Skoolers slowly started converting to more of an online platform. Skoolers fully switched to online services during COVID-19, because Aleman “couldn’t justifiably put 50 to 75 kids in a room, jam packed, and go in there for four hours,” he said.
Aleman stated that Skoolers Tutoring in Athens has evolved to tutoring 35-40% of undergraduate business students at the University of Georgia on average per semester. As the leading tutoring service for UGA business students, the key question is: how do they do it?
Promotion Techniques of Skoolers
When asked how many advertisements Skoolers released in 2022, Aleman responded with, “0. Yeah, that’s a magic number.” He explained how they have looked into advertising through billboards and fliers, but realized that “word of mouth sparks it infinitely more than anything we can try,” Aleman said. Positive word of mouth takes the place of paid advertisements.
Conversations about and praise for Skoolers radiates between the undergraduate business students. “I knew before even getting my syllabus for accounting that I would need Skoolers, and yet I’ve never seen an ad for it,” UGA Terry College of Business student Libby Carter said. “I just knew to get it because everyone else always has and talks about it.”
Skoolers also promotes itself by its reputable purple review packets and style of teaching. When walking through UGA’s campus, you are bound to see groups of students completing their purple Skoolers packets that review class material, provide homework explanations and help with exam preparation. Skoolers is also known for its unique teaching style. Aleman uses cuss words and funny examples, including, “Suppose that a recent Alabama graduate has decided to use his super-valuable college degree to become a magician..,” and, “The Frodd U Lent Corporation.”
Aleman said, “It’s tricky to hold it back, it’s actually harder,” regarding the choice to include humor in the material. This style of teaching gives students a small break from the stress and seriousness of their business classes.
Aleman prepares to record a video review to upload to Skoolers’ website. Under the calculator is one Skoolers review packets that students use to review class material and prepare for exams. (Photo/Madison Balk)
How Skoolers addresses students’ fear of tutoring
A study at Pacific Lutheran University in 2014 was conducted to determine why students do not take advantage of tutoring services that are easily accessible to them. Through focus groups, this study found that the participants avoided tutoring services due to time conflicts, limited tutor availability, wanting confidentiality, and fear of judgment, one-on-one tutoring, and being seen as failing.
Skoolers has a solution to each of these fears that contributes to its success as a tutoring center. Skoolers is extremely accessible to all of its customers, offering a completely virtual format of tutoring. It is unique in that they offer packets of teaching material and review packets that coincide with explanation videos. They also offer video explanations of the class homework, practice problems and practice exams. Time conflicts and tutor unavailability is nonexistent because students complete the uploaded reviews at their own pace.
Because Skoolers is an online tutoring aid, students’ identities are kept confidential, so there are no opportunities for judgment. In optional private tutoring and the online discussion wall, “We try to ameliorate their concerns naturally,” Aleman said while explaining how they address each student’s questions with sincerity and thank students for asking.
Skoolers Tutoring’s uniqueness provides these services to students that otherwise are not available, which ultimately is how it is so successful. Aleman and his team within Skoolers have created a business that is so brilliant and helpful that it succeeds and grows without any advertising.
Aleman records a video to upload to the Skoolers website. (Video/Madison Balk)
Why I Wrote the Story
I wrote this story because Skoolers Tutoring fascinates me. I am pursuing a general business minor at UGA and am/have been enrolled in Skoolers for a few of the classes. Before I began the minor, I knew exactly what Skoolers was and that you needed it if you were taking one of the hard business classes. When we were told to write about a prominent figure on our beat, mine being business, I knew immediately that I wanted to write about Skoolers to learn more about it and I knew it would make an intriguing and relevant story. I learned a great amount of information about the background of Skoolers as well as gained valuable experience writing my first profile story.