Meet the woman who’s training the next generation of thoughtful influencers.

By Kylie Adair

It all started with one client—a teenage girl Tiffany Sorya was hired to tutor through an agency.

Sorya was living in Los Angeles, had earned a degree in biology and wanted to find a way to turn her love of learning into a career, so she decided to start tutoring part time. As time went on, her caseload grew and she began receiving private referrals, too. She started putting in hours and hours, often full work days homeschooling plus tutoring in the evenings.

A turning point came when she booked Kendall and Kylie Jenner as clients—the reality stars and social media moguls were finishing high school while filming Keeping Up With the Kardashians and needed a flexible schooling situation. After booking two of the world’s most high-profile homeschooled kids as clients, Sorya realized she could branch out on her own and founded Novel Education Group.

These days, Novel has expanded to include teachers around the world—from Mexico to Dubai and, of course, LA. The company’s clientele is made up of young people working in the entertainment industry, kids whose parents travel often for work, those whose parents simply prefer homeschooling, and teenagers on their way to influencer status—or who have already arrived there.

Heading into our conversation, I was curious about how Sorya manages to make her students care about learning the more traditional subjects like math and english. Why would they care, when they’ve grown up in the age of social media influencers? With the skills, instinct and, in many cases, access necessary to build exciting careers via the magic of social media? In light of the recent conversations around education, privilege and entitlement spurred by the college admissions scandal, I was looking forward to hearing Sorya’s perspective on educating these kinds of privileged spaces.

What I came to understand as we talked is that Sorya’s doing something, well, novel. If ‘influencer’ is here to stay as a career path, and if young people on social media continue to have real and measurable impact on the world, Sorya’s job is to equip the next generation of social media stars with the communication and critical thinking skills to use their influence for meaning and for good.

Kylie Adair is the editorial director at kaur. space. She has a bachelor’s degree in journalism and human rights and a miniature schnauzer named Dot.