Varsity Tutors for Schools saw a steep decline in business as pandemic aid ran out and districts demanded more proof of learning gains for students.
As students head back to class across the country, Varsity Tutors for Schools, one of the nation’s largest providers, has gone out of business.
In a shareholder letter last week, Chuck Cohn, CEO of Nerdy, Varsity’s parent company, wrote that leaders would “wind down” the online service they launched during the pandemic as districts nationwide spent billions in federal relief funds to help students recover lost learning.
Instead, Missouri-based Nerdy will focus on its original Varsity Tutors model, which targets services directly to parents and college students, rather than schools. That, Cohn wrote, is “our core business, where the opportunity is significantly larger and where our resources and management bandwidth earn better returns.”
In a Friday note to Accelerate, a nonprofit that funded Varsity last year as part of a research study, a representative from the company wrote: “Today we are communicating to our school customers that we will be discontinuing services effective today.”
The end of Varsity Tutors for Schools follows the abrupt termination of another large provider, FEV Tutor, in early 2025 as relief funds dried up. But tutoring experts say this shutdown is not just another example of districts running out of extra federal money. In fact, multiple states, like Louisiana and Massachusetts, now provide ongoing funding for high-impact tutoring, including virtual models. With districts increasingly demanding strong results, Varsity Tutors for Schools, they say, wasn’t able to deliver proof that their services increased student performance.
For-profit providers, like Nerdy, have to answer to investors and shareholders. But regardless of the business model, those “that adhere closely to the research are going to be the ones that are more likely to have stronger outcomes,” said Kathy Bendheim, strategic advising director at the National Student Support Accelerator, a tutoring research center at Stanford University.
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