Pros
Working with kids, working for a small business (most Sylvans are franchised), corporate support
Cons
I found that the biggest hurdle was the large discrepancy between our product and what we asked parents to pay for it. My center charged nearly $50/hour for a program designed to help students with remedial work. The number of times I had to field unhappy customers who didn't realize that, at that price point, their child still wouldn't receive 1:1 attention, was astounding. Sylvan sets up their directors to have to lie to the face of their customers. We were expected to doctor student test results in order to appease parents. We often had to come up with excuses why, at $50/hour, their child wasn't making the progress we had promised. As the face of the company, to these people who have invested sometimes thousands of dollars to help their kids, we took the most abuse when the miracle we promised just didn't deliver. I am not disparaging the product - but it isn't the miracle we advertise, and Sylvan's aggressive marketing and approach didn't work in the lower-income area where I worked. Maybe if you can afford to send a child to tutoring three or four times a week, it might take. I was there for nearly five years and that was a real rarity. More often than not, the kids who made significant progress at the minimally-recommended two hours per week were kids who weren't engaged at school, but understood the material well enough to do the activities that would get them prizes at the Sylvan Store. There was also very little work/life balance, as a director. Between our two directors, we each worked 10-hour days, and on early nights I still wouldn't be home until almost 7:30pm. We were only allowed half-hour lunches, and expected to be on-call if something came up on the weekend or outside of scheduled hours. There was never any discussion of hiring another set of hands.
