Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Teachers Forum A moral Dilemma of a possibly Real Situation

lol, I am not really considering raising it to $70 I don't think, probably to $60 though.

If you want to find out how families and students view me, you can view my testimonial page and check out the 5 different testimonials.

Gods Gift To Piano Students Or ... Something Else?

You don't have a question there, so of course there wouldn't be any moral issue.

Business and Moral Philosophy are somewhat intertwined - Any businessman who says otherwise is probably a pretty shitty businessman.

Running a business is not STRICTLY Demand / Profit / Mathematics. It is Customer Service, How should an ethical business be ran, Is it appropriate to take advantage of your Clients, Is It moral to suck in a full studio with low rates only to raise them later, etc ...

I do see a business question, a question of diplomacy, a question of how (diplomatically and in a businesslike way) to keep the students who are learning and send a message to those who aren't...

But morality? There's no moral issue. Sorry.

I guess that answers my question.

I seem to have a more general view of morality encompasses then. I feel a bit strange about jacking up the rates to a significantly higher level for my current students - a feeling that is not strictly about whether or not I'll keep the students, but how will the parents feel towards me ... or if it's an ethical decision.

If that isn't morality, then I don't know what your definition of morality would be.

I always believe everything I read on the Internet. Everything!

lol ...

I can assure you though, I didn't offer them free lessons for good testimonials or anything!

I mean, you'd have to think I wrote the testimonials myself - If you wanted to take the time and hire a linguist to deconstruct the syntax of the sentences to see if they correlate to my own way of writing, let me know what you find as a result.

I still think we piano teachers tend to err on the side of being overly altruistic, even if the result is that our own children can't participate in activities that their friends can afford, or will have trouble affording college (that's everyone now, though). Maybe I'm just being pessimistic tonight.

I think we can ameliorate any personal moral concerns we may harbor by participating as a volunteer with non-profit music schools, MusicLink, doing pro bono work, etc....

Can you imagine any other professional group having this discussion about rates? I'm trying to picture it and just can't see it. What's the matter with us? Have we been charging such low rates as a profession for so long, that we just can't change?

I'm saying this as someone who is a complete wimp about raising fees. I should probably stop now and go to bed.

hah, instead of going to bed, maybe you should raise your fees instead!

Really though, if you run the numbers ... 25 hours of teaching X $60 / hour comes out to be just a hair below 80k a year. Plug in performance money / side job at a church or two (and perhaps not paying your full share of taxes, not judging anyone who doesn't) , that really is in the top 25% of earners in the USA at least ... top 10% if you have two really nice church jobs (organists get paid pretty well I hear.)

How much people make in the US

Dustin, my tech told me I need to be more in the $60/hour range, too. But it still makes me nervous, mostly because my husband and I are both self-employed, and he is a contractor at that, so unless the phone rings, he isn't working. *I* have the stable, reliable income. We are rather odd, I suspect.

I have a family who take lessons on another instrument as well, and that teacher just raises rates on the spot, as in "oh, by the way, here's the new rate" and points to a sheet of paper on the wall. !! I can't imagine feeling secure enough to do that. Maybe after I finally finish this NCTM I will have some courage. Sheesh.

That's with teaching 52 weeks a year, though!

well, do you want the money or not!?

Nobody says you have to take vacations.

Even if you took 2 to 4 weeks vacation every year, it wouldn't cut your yearly salary by THAT much to complain about.

I'm not complaining about my salary at all. But I wonder if you could keep that up - 25 hours pw solid teaching, with no breaks. Just seems an unrealistic estimate. But if that's what you want to do, by all means go for it!My concern about this thread is that that's all it seems to be about. I don't think teachers should hesitate to charge a fee appropriate for their qualifications and experience, and they needn't be apologetic. That's certainly how I operate. But if you want to get rich quick, I'd choose another career.

Agreed.

Also, we had our MTAC meeting a few weeks ago. EVERYONE was in need of more students--even the really good teachers! The economy definitely has not picked up around here.

It got so bad around here, a few "music schools" have decided to branch into offering ballet classes.

Staying with the facts of the original question, look at it this way: Your studio is full, and you have a waiting list of 30 applicants...

Under those facts, any economist who ever lived -- whether it's Milton Friedman or Karl Marx -- would tell you that you are UNDERPRICING your lessons.

So imagine that for every student who came in, for every lesson, you actually took out your wallet and handed that student $15 to $25 dollars as a gift.

Would you really do that in real life? If so, stay with the current arrangement, because that's exactly what you're already doing, though the delivery mechanics are slightly different.

If not, charge per lesson the amount that the market is now saying you're worth -- then satisfy your altruistic urges by donating some or all of your increased earnings to whatever charitable cause most tickles your fancy (including discounts or rebates to deserving or needy students, if you like). If you leave things in the status quo, you've made a default decision to make the "donations" of the entire amount of your aggregate underpricing to each student (deserving, needy, or neither) on a lesson-by-lesson basis.

Again, if the facts are as originally stated, it's not a question of morality, but rather of how diplomatically to adjust to the price that the piano student market is ALREADY saying you are worth -- a price that to date you have elected to forego collecting.

Are you telling me you think every teacher charges the exact same for every student? No one has any partial scholarship students?

That's not quite accurate, as it has been discussed on this forum before. We have to be sure to compare apples to apples. Teachers who charge $60/hr and have 25 hours of teaching do NOT make $80k, unless they are employed somewhere. The private music teacher is a freelancer, who has to shoulder their own overhead expenses such as purchase and maintenance of an instrument, continued education, hours worked in prep that are not necessarily paid for (or in your example, 25 hours of teaching = 50 hours of total work including prep time and business-related work), insurance, extra vehicle maintenance if they travel to teach, books, attending seminars, etc. You really can't compare that to someone who works a salaried or hourly job as an employee.

I think this is where uncertainty and risk comes in. You may guess that you can command higher pay, but it's a change, and you don't really know what will happen.

It may not be so much a question of whether I am worth it as a teacher, but uncertainty about parent responses. What does it take for current students to go elsewhere for lessons, or for inquiring students to be uninterested in enrolling?

If you are already at the top of the range of fees charged by local teachers, you may find that you keep current students, but no longer get as many new ones as you'd like.

If you see raising fees as a moral issue, then it's based on the idea that higher fees are cheating students. Are my new fees "highway robbery"? (to quote an old thread).

Ann, I appreciate what you're saying, but clearly if he has a waiting list this long, he needs to raise his rates.