What we at GraduateTutor.com do is pretty clear to most people – we provide live online tutoring to MBA students around the country. But we still get the question – who are your customers?! We have outlined who are our customers in a full post here.

A section of our customers are smart students who would not have required outside tutoring. However, even smart students often are left on the lurch when we have bad teachers! About.com has an interesting article by Jamie Littlefield on what to do if your online professor is not a good teacher!

Here are the steps she offers.

Step 1: Reassess the problem.

Step 2: Talk to the professor privately.

Step 3: Withdraw from the online course, if there’s still time.

Step 4: Call your academic counselor.

Step 5: Talk to the Dean and file a complaint.

You can read the full article here.

The DOJ has sued Apple and 5 other publishers accusing them of colluding to increase the prices of ebooks. Read more in the WSJ and the Huffington Post.  While the case is about ebooks in general, we are hoping that it will eventually spill over into text books too.

As MBA tutors, we empathize with the students cost burden. With an already high cost of education (tuition, living, etc) paying $150 for text books really really bothers students. Especially when they find that in 3 or 6 months, these student may never use the book again!

This case is alleging that these publishers met in private dinning rooms to discuss ways in which they can sell ebooks higher in response to Amazon selling them at $9.99 a piece.  One wonders what actions cause the price of text books to stay so high!

For a long time no one ever challenged the value of education. They all of a sudden there were a lot of critics shouting about the draw backs of the cost of education and the debt students are left with and even declaring that its not worth going to college.  Now the trend is reversing again – or seems to be starting to at least.

Derek Thompson of The Atlantic has this recent article highlighting the value of education.  He backs it up with some great data from multiple sources. This is not the first time he has defended education. He wrote about it last year too using pretty much the same supporting data.

Is an investment in college worth it?  As MBA tutors, we often get this question at parties and for that matter in any sort of gathering. A highlight if you ever thought college is not worth it:

A study from the Hamilton Project found that $100,000 spent on college at age 18 would yield a higher lifetime return than an equal investment in corporate bonds, U.S. government debt, or hot company stocks.

Here is another interesting quote.

A 2009 McKinsey report estimated that if we raised our education performance to the level of Korea, we could improve the US economy by more than $2 trillion.

Read the full article highlighting the value of education. It is worth it.

George Bradt has an article in the Forbes.  He claims that recruiters agree that the only three things you need to know for an interview are:

1. Can you do the job?

2. Will you love the job?

3. Can we tolerate working with you?

It seems simplistic! Overly so. But we as MBA tutors kind of agree with George. We help students prepare for case interviews and provide case interview tips and we see students do crazy things to prepare for interviews but miss the basics. These three questions do cover the basics.

You have got to show that you can do the job, you love it and that the interviewer will regret not hiring you. Its not just the qualifications. Its about giving evidence in multiple ways including prior activity, interest, reliability, etc. Interviewer watch for this in all questions, responses and actions an interviewee provides. Read the full article here.

Understanding statistics is important for many aspects of life, business, work, careers & research.  The Economist has a nice article that shows the importance of statistics and raw data. Read the full article here. If the raw statistics is wrong, no amount of data analysis or quantitative analysis will be helpful. Nice move by the Economist to drop the official Argentinian Statistical Office numbers and replace them with more reliable estimates!

This article mentions the billions of dollars that investors have lost. It is directly impacting those who may have bought inflation protected bonds or assets as an artificially low  inflation estimate directly costs you money! Should you need help understanding more about any of these topics our statistics tutors or finance tutors will be glad to assist you.

We have had discussions about the Buffet tax. Now comes the Zuckerberg tax! With the Facebook IPO looming large and the quantifying of Mark Zuckerberg’s wealth there has been a lot of discussions on his tax liability. What is sure is that he will pay taxes of about $2 billion on only the portion of stock that he exercises which is around $5 billion. This seems like a large tax bill at 30% of income! However, it may be the only tax that he every pays on possibly $50 or $100 billion of wealth – not bad tax planning with an effective rate of about 1-2%! This is because of our tax system which taxes Individuals only when they actually sell property and realize their gains! So if Zuckerberg never sells his shares but only borrows against it, he will never pay any additional taxes.

This seems unfair to many folks but is perfectly legitimate under the current tax system. Also legitimate is the fact that investors pay lower taxes which is what prompted Obama to suggest the “Buffet tax”! Will we see the request for a Zuckerberg tax – one that requires individuals to pay taxes on market value of assets? Probably never because of the Pandora’s box that could be opened up with the challenges of deciding what is the market value of an asset!

While the Buffet tax or the Zuckerberg tax may never get passed into law, the accounting tutoring team will be happy to help you understand these tax rule recommendations if you desire so.

This is an ongoing debate. One that requires serious study and more empirical studies. One that is very important given the money and time pour society spends on sports.  As CPA, CFA and MBA tutors our focus is on helping students with finance, accounting, statistics, etc but we also want to help them truly evolve as individuals. So we do encourage sports as we believe it builds various aspects of personality in individuals.

Here is an excellent article on this topic. It does not provide any statistics or facts but is an excellent and entertaining read drawing on the authors own experience and some classic history. Recommended read for all tutors and not just CPA, CFA and MBA tutors.

Senate leader Darrell Steinberg’s is proposing funding  to bring digital open source textbooks to California. We say Yes to open source text books. Costs of education have been going up in the country and anything to help students lower the costs of education is a move in the right direction. It will be better for the economy and country in the long run.

Why is this limited to California!? All other states need this too.

GraduateTutor’s mission is simply to ‘Make Learning Easier”.  Currently we do this by provide private tutoring which is one one one to students around the country and other parts of the world. As online learning has exploded, there has been a lot of debate about the quality of learning provided by the hundreds of online universities, online learning institutes, services, websites and programs. It currently is far from perfect but it is something that will keep getting better. Robert Connor has written about parts of this debate in a recent article in the Chronicle. We are glad that there is more discussion on this topic and investments being made.

While there is still no clarity or agreement on the best way forward, we are very sure that we tremendously increase the quality of learning online with private tutoring. Its definitely very valuable and effective. It however, is not very scalable  like most things done one-on-one. The question is should something like this be scalable!? Can it exist over the long term without being scalable?

MIT has just launched MITx. MITx will be a learning platform that hosts a number of MIT courses online. It will be interactive and free to students from around the world. MITx will also enable students to grade themselves on the subjects too. What is truly innovate IMHO is that they will allow student to show their mastery over a subject to get a certificate of completion (although not from MIT to distinguish and presumably not to diminish the value of their on campus programs!). This is moving towards competence based education rather than time based education.

MIT has been in the forefront of open course ware or OCW since its launch 10 years ago. They are taking it even further with the launch of MITx, an initiative led by MIT Provost L. Rafael Reif.  MIT deserves significant praise for their efforts in freeing up education.

We at GraduateTutor.com are on standby to assist students who may need some private tutoring to master the subjects of choice.