More musings on pricing
by rrusczyk, Jul 8, 2006, 4:00 PM
The recent 'discussion' on the WOOT early-bird deadline thread has me thinking about pricing issues again. Mainly, it's hard to be in a business where much of the world is trained to think of the good as 'free.' For whatever reason, many people seem to think education should be essentially free, yet will think nothing of paying through the nose for a mediocre music or athletic lesson. Those, people are used to paying for. However, most people appear to get their classes and their books for free. Until they get to college. Then, education is accepted as a business by the consumers. Until that point, it's just taxes that pay for education, and people by and large don't connect the dots, realizing that their tax dollars pay *much more* for their math classes than we charge. So, that's my semi-rant on the difficulties of pricing in the educational market in general. We're still wildly under-priced in virtually all our classes (per hour around 1/4 of EPGY for comparable classes), and in books, as well (compare our texts to any of the problem books put out by major publishers - prices about the same, our books have instruction rather than only problems, and are 1.5-4 times longer).
As for pricing for our classes specifically, we're widely off-market low on everything except WOOT, which I'd describe as moderately off-market low. The main reason we have to price WOOT differently than our other classes (aside from the fact that we have to start pricing something closer to reality in order to pay the bills) is that we re-create the class every year, partly because the program really only becomes viable if we have repeat students - the universe of olympiad hopefuls is quite small.
One amusing side note is that it's not unusual to hear from parents of long-time students of ours that we have to start increasing our prices faster so we can stay in business, hire more people, and create more educational opportunities. There's something to that argument, but we're not making any radical changes at this point. However, until we price the classes more accurately, it will be hard for us to find the time or money to create any new courses. (Though, somehow we keep convincing ourselves it's a good idea to do other things for free, like the AoPSWiki, which is off to a far better start than I imagined.)
As for pricing for our classes specifically, we're widely off-market low on everything except WOOT, which I'd describe as moderately off-market low. The main reason we have to price WOOT differently than our other classes (aside from the fact that we have to start pricing something closer to reality in order to pay the bills) is that we re-create the class every year, partly because the program really only becomes viable if we have repeat students - the universe of olympiad hopefuls is quite small.
One amusing side note is that it's not unusual to hear from parents of long-time students of ours that we have to start increasing our prices faster so we can stay in business, hire more people, and create more educational opportunities. There's something to that argument, but we're not making any radical changes at this point. However, until we price the classes more accurately, it will be hard for us to find the time or money to create any new courses. (Though, somehow we keep convincing ourselves it's a good idea to do other things for free, like the AoPSWiki, which is off to a far better start than I imagined.)
![$\$[/dollar]$](http://latex.artofproblemsolving.com/d/a/5/da584f63e95661ac4d799801745d89167c4e58ab.png)
![$\$[/dollar]700$](http://latex.artofproblemsolving.com/d/1/9/d19557f5f8c5418bd44ef2eb387d85c3c528e9c7.png)
is a great price for WOOT since you get feedback and are taught usefull things you need to know to solve olympiad level problems. The time to get someone who knows how to solve olympiad level problems to teach you how to solve them is worth alot more than 
February 2012
January 2012