Chelsea International Education: RIP High-paying Tutor Site

What was Chelsea International Education?

Chelsea International Education was a tutoring platform that enlisted freelance educators to tutor kids both online and in person. The site differed from other tutoring platforms in that it only hired experienced educators, and it paid them commensurate to their experience — often quite generously.

However, as of March 2025, the site appears to be defunct.

While still online, the Chelsea site is unreadable and its phone number goes to an advertising pitch for Medicare Advantage plans.

Recommendations

If you’re looking for the type of high-paying tutoring opportunities once offered by this site, we’d suggest you sign up with Wyzant. Wyzant is one of the largest and best-established tutoring sites in the world and allows tutors to set their own rates, schedules, and determine whether they’ll tutor in person or online.

You can read our full Wyzant review here.

(This post may contain affiliate links. You can read our full affiliate policy here.)

For those simply interested in the site’s history, you can read on. But know that this opportunity is no longer available.

How Chelsea Worked

Tutors who wanted to apply here had to have recent teaching experience and needed to be LifeScanned. The site would then interview you and, if you passed that screening, would present you with appropriate tutoring opportunities in your area of expertise.

Pay

If you made it through that gauntlet and happen to teach high-demand subjects, like higher math or SAT prep, you could be paid generously. Tutor pay ranges widely, according to company officials.

Someone tutoring elementary students online, for instance, might make as little as $15 per hour. The same job, if done in person, would pay $25 – $35. However, the pay rose steeply for those able to coach kids in the subjects needed to get good scores on college and graduate school admissions tests. Pay was also higher for STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) subjects in high demand.

Chelsea didn’t charge a commission on tutor pay, but it marked up the price of your services. So, for the tutoring job that pays $15, Chelsea earns $36; for the one paying $35, it gets $70.

While that’s a high mark-up, it doesn’t officially come out of the tutor’s pocket. That said, it increases the cost to students and might prove a deterrent for hiring Chelsea tutors.

Students

However, again unlike most other tutoring platforms, students didn’t choose their tutors here. Chelsea made the connections between tutors and students. (At other sites, tutors post profiles and students — or their parents — choose them, based on their rates, experience and availability.)

The site said it attempted to maintain the same tutor for students until they complete a course of study. But that’s not guaranteed for teacher or student.

Recommendations

Although Chelsea promised good pay to seasoned educators, those educators had less control here than they do at other sites. This site was also relatively small and unlikely to bring in the wealth of students that you can find with the industry giants.

If you met all of Chelsea’s requirements and were convinced that you’ll want to tutor for at least a year, Chelsea was worth checking out.

Overall, we think the opportunities are better at Wyzant, where you set your own rate of pay and simply pay a commission to the site for making the connections and collecting payment for you.

Wyzant not only draws more monthly visitors than any other tutoring site, it charges tutors just 25% of their pay. That’s about half as much as Chelsea. That allows you to make more, while charging parents comparatively less. That’s a recipe for success. You can sign up with Wyzant here.

What their tutors say: (from Indeed)

This is an easy, structured way for educators to make extra money as tutors without setting up their own company. Reasonable pay rate. The owner is very scrupulous about checking in with her contractors, and providing helpful feedback. Sometimes response times are slow, but not to an irritating degree.

Updated 3/20/2025