I too had to threaten before I was properly paid. Find an alternative tutoring company. - Academic Coach Cardinal Education Employee Review

1.0
24 Nov 2015
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- Pay is okay, not great, if you can get nearby students - The actual tutoring is enjoyable; the students are often great to work with. If you enjoy this enough, it can make working with the office tolerable.

Cons

- There was a missed payment over the summer that I quickly brought to their attention. I was promised multiple times that it was being investigated. My repeated emails went largely unanswered or were given vague responses with no timeline. I was told to contact the CEO who did not make my issue a priority. The payment did not reach my bank account until November, shortly after I threatened filing a report with the BBB. - On a related note, in terms of senior employee accountability, I was promised a recommendation letter from one of the consultants at the company for a full-time position I was pursuing. He/she missed the deadline to submit it. - Rate is advertised at an hourly wage, but after travel time, gas, time filling out reports, weekly phone calls with office, communication with families, etc. are included, I calculate it to be approximately half of the advertised rate. Know this if you apply. - If you fill in as a substitute when they request it, you are actually only paid less per hour which is ridiculous because you are doing them a favor by being available on short notice, but your pay rate is reduced. Know this if you volunteer to substitute. - Micromanaging is rampant. Despite the fact that I was repeatedly told during my weekly phone calls that I was the best coach they had, they still felt the need to micromanage everything, whether it be scheduling, grading, or reports. Session reports have a bunch of unnecessary requirements but they will get on your case if you, for example, fail to list an "introspective question" each time. - You will be required to obtain grading log in information from students/families. Some families are very uncomfortable with this, and my relationship with them was hurt by the aggressive nature of this request.

avatar
Cardinal Education Response
10y
We are disappointed that you did not have a stellar experience with Cardinal Education. We believe in providing a collaborative, positive environment that encourages staff to communicate with our management. Our session reports are designed to open those communication pipelines and push our coaches to grow professionally. We know how tough it can be out there in the field to execute our holistic mission to make a difference with a student - we want to be involved in that process! We work predominantly with families who expect the best, and we want to make sure we are providing our over a decade of institutional memory to help all of our staff be successful! As for pay, we are proud to provide compensation that is well-above industry average and a bonus system that rewards coaches for embodying our mission to change lives. Lastly, for the letter of recommendation, could you please email one of our staff about this? We believe in helping launch the careers of our staff, whether that's moving on to some of the top medical and law schools in the country or to top employers like Goldman Sachs. We regularly provide great recommendations for former staff members, and we'd be happy to follow up on this to understand what happened. Thank you!

Explore other reviews about Cardinal Education

5.0
13 May 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Good to know they have a lot of assessments almost all the subjects you've learned through your high school, but not hard.

Cons

There are a lot of assessments

1.0
28 June 2026
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Lunches were free everyday Mon-Fri.

Cons

1. The CEO uses his background from Stanford to really break into family dynamics that are difficult essentially taking advantage of the "support" of the consulting. 2. This is a family/friends run business. They will only hire you to stay in a busy cycle when they have huge amount of clients and drop you when that cycle is finished. 3. This job is dressed as a consulting job but they don't care about impact and only care about how to keep the clients longer. They will make kids fail their assessments on purpose, point out issues that are minor and make it seem like a big deal. 4. Extremely disorganized org given that it was created more than 20 years ago and yet still everything is in a google drive. 5. Another classical ego dressed as a CEO. Please stop pretending this is goldman sachs and perhaps start investing on how to create a structure for your company (long overdue).

See reviews by: Helpful|Rating|Date|All