3 ms·

“I Signed Up to Write College Essays for Rich Kids”

23 points by jseliger 5y ago

kdig2412 5y ago
Wasn't expecting this part of the story, but super interesting "And more often than not, it wasn’t students—or parents—at elite colleges purchasing papers. It was students at community colleges working for minimum wage who didn’t have time to write them."
fossuser 5y ago
Reminds me a little of this: https://www.vice.com/da/article/xd578z/i-ghostwrote-hundreds-of-chinese-students-ivy-league-admissions-essays-897 https://www.vice.com/da/article/xd578z/i-ghostwrote-hundreds... [0] I don't have much sympathy for the cheaters or those writing these essays rationalizing it via whatever excuse is most convenient (though at least in the essay linked above she feels bad about it). For every one of them there are many dealing with difficult stuff and also not cheating. There is a deeper issue here with admissions, selling prestige by enforcing scarcity. A lot of things become signaling rather than actually about learning. Hopefully we'll see better options for a lot of this in the future. --- [0]: "Of course, I didn’t have time for moral quandaries. As my name became more popular, I found myself with more clients than I had time to help. I couldn’t interview all of them, so I needed to find a way to produce essays faster. My solution: writing about my own intimate experiences. "One December evening, I used one of my most embarrassing moments as the basis for an essay for a 17-year-old Chinese girl who had never desired something she could not afford. The event happened shortly after my father abandoned my family when I was a kid, leaving us broke. Our water and lights were turned off, and my mom was working multiple jobs to support us. Since we lacked utilities, my mother washed our laundry at the local Laundromat. One day, she left our laundry at the Laundromat while she went to finish errands. When she returned, she discovered that someone had stolen our clothes from the washer. The stolen laundry comprised most of the clothes we owned, so my mother took my sister and me to Goodwill to buy clothes. A classmate spotted me at the thrift store, and the next day at school, she pointed at me and called me poor in front of my entire English class. "As a college admissions essay, this story was pure gold. You could wrap anything around the story, and it would work, especially since students love rags-to-riches tales. "Except, my life was still made up of rags. Nothing exemplified my rags better than me sitting in front of the laptop, preparing to sell this still wounded part of myself for $400, but without any debate, I emailed the essay to my 17-year-old client. "The loss hit me immediately. Looking at my closed computer, I felt like a stranger to myself. Every time I used my weaknesses and memorable moments in my clients’ essays, I felt a part of myself disappear. Already floundering in that directionless void of post-college life, I began to lose the one anchor I had: myself. "I don’t know what I was expecting in return from the student. Would my client feel the pain of the story and then question the ethics of using another person’s life as an admissions essay? Would she call me and thank me for cutting out a personal part of my heart for her? Later, I received a one-word email from her: “Thanks.” The message stung. I thought about the itchy Goodwill sweater and how much itchier it had felt as I cried after my classmate mocked me. I had given up a private piece of myself for the bargain price of $400. I logged off and shut down my laptop."
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- cafard 5y ago
  The anecdote suggests a lack of experience. Some writers recycle bad memories through a memoir and a couple of novels. Whether in total the story fetches them more than $400/page, who knows?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
sithadmin 5y ago
I used to ghostwrite in my late undergrad and grad school years. While I did take a lot of conventional ghost writing jobs - blog content, marketing copy, and even the occasional local news article or op-ed, a majority of my work (and income) was sourced from essay writing for other students, and this was by far the most profitable and easy work. I could easily earn between $100-$150 USD in a day with 2-3 hours of effort. Compared to other typical student jobs, doing the writing gigs was a no-brainer. Less time. More money. Can do it while lightly multitasking (listening to podcasts, etc). For a student, I lived very comfortably. In fact, my first year in a 'real' job, I actually made less money than I did when I was writing college students' essays. I constantly feel like I should be more ashamed of myself for enabling others to cheat, but I have difficulty mustering much regret about it. There are only a handful of types of people that are willing to pay $10-20/page for some nicely-formatted, double-spaced drivel, and I don't think the fact that they sometimes (or maybe always) cheated makes a difference in the long run. I'd regularly engage my clients in discussions and look at their online identity to see who exactly I was working for. The super-majority of customers appeared to be wealthy foreign students that, though they would present a good rough outline of what they wanted in an essay, lacked the English skills to turn the outline into a readable document. These were typically students in engineering or hard science disciplines buying their way out of a 'core curriculum' class with little to no direct relevance to their discipline, and they generally viewed English communication skills as irrelevant to their future plans to return to their home country and practice whatever skill they picked up at a US university. The next most common 'type' of essay buyer was the business student that clearly was failed by whatever primary education system they were subjected to. Most were obviously from wealthy backgrounds, but a surprising number seemed to be poor and desperate to keep their head above water. This type of client usually had abysmal written communication skills despite being a native English speaker, and often struggled to provide any sort of coherent guidance in terms of what they expected in the essay that would be delivered. I eventually began charging this type of client double what I would charge the latter sort, because their sheer inability to convey what they wanted or needed would in turn make my life difficult. They were also the most likely to complain or demand last-minute edits. Out of this category of client, the people with family wealth and connections have a better-than-average chance of success regardless; the people desperately paying to offload their essays to pass a course will either be forced to improve their own skill-sets and knowledge, or end up sinking to whatever level of work is appropriate for them. I have a hard time believing that selling either sort of student an essay or two radically impacts their life prospects, or the prospects of other students (that might be subject to a grade curve somehow influenced by my work).
underseacables 5y ago
Recently I met a guy who confessed to cheating his way through college by paying bribes to inferno graduate students. It was only five years ago, but he said that the university charged such outrageous tuition for these international students, that mini were so desperate for money that they saw no qualms about stealing exams, taking exams, and writing his papers. It made me ponder for a bit if the current university system created their own mess.

23 points by jseliger 5y ago

Wasn't expecting this part of the story, but super interesting "And more often than not, it wasn’t students—or parents—at elite colleges purchasing papers. It was students at community colleges working for minimum wage who didn’t have time to write them."

fossuser 5y ago

Reminds me a little of this: https://www.vice.com/da/article/xd578z/i-ghostwrote-hundreds-of-chinese-students-ivy-league-admissions-essays-897 https://www.vice.com/da/article/xd578z/i-ghostwrote-hundreds... [0] I don't have much sympathy for the cheaters or those writing these essays rationalizing it via whatever excuse is most convenient (though at least in the essay linked above she feels bad about it). For every one of them there are many dealing with difficult stuff and also not cheating. There is a deeper issue here with admissions, selling prestige by enforcing scarcity. A lot of things become signaling rather than actually about learning. Hopefully we'll see better options for a lot of this in the future. --- [0]: "Of course, I didn’t have time for moral quandaries. As my name became more popular, I found myself with more clients than I had time to help. I couldn’t interview all of them, so I needed to find a way to produce essays faster. My solution: writing about my own intimate experiences. "One December evening, I used one of my most embarrassing moments as the basis for an essay for a 17-year-old Chinese girl who had never desired something she could not afford. The event happened shortly after my father abandoned my family when I was a kid, leaving us broke. Our water and lights were turned off, and my mom was working multiple jobs to support us. Since we lacked utilities, my mother washed our laundry at the local Laundromat. One day, she left our laundry at the Laundromat while she went to finish errands. When she returned, she discovered that someone had stolen our clothes from the washer. The stolen laundry comprised most of the clothes we owned, so my mother took my sister and me to Goodwill to buy clothes. A classmate spotted me at the thrift store, and the next day at school, she pointed at me and called me poor in front of my entire English class. "As a college admissions essay, this story was pure gold. You could wrap anything around the story, and it would work, especially since students love rags-to-riches tales. "Except, my life was still made up of rags. Nothing exemplified my rags better than me sitting in front of the laptop, preparing to sell this still wounded part of myself for $400, but without any debate, I emailed the essay to my 17-year-old client. "The loss hit me immediately. Looking at my closed computer, I felt like a stranger to myself. Every time I used my weaknesses and memorable moments in my clients’ essays, I felt a part of myself disappear. Already floundering in that directionless void of post-college life, I began to lose the one anchor I had: myself. "I don’t know what I was expecting in return from the student. Would my client feel the pain of the story and then question the ethics of using another person’s life as an admissions essay? Would she call me and thank me for cutting out a personal part of my heart for her? Later, I received a one-word email from her: “Thanks.” The message stung. I thought about the itchy Goodwill sweater and how much itchier it had felt as I cried after my classmate mocked me. I had given up a private piece of myself for the bargain price of $400. I logged off and shut down my laptop."

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
cafard 5y ago
The anecdote suggests a lack of experience. Some writers recycle bad memories through a memoir and a couple of novels. Whether in total the story fetches them more than $400/page, who knows?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

sithadmin 5y ago

I used to ghostwrite in my late undergrad and grad school years. While I did take a lot of conventional ghost writing jobs - blog content, marketing copy, and even the occasional local news article or op-ed, a majority of my work (and income) was sourced from essay writing for other students, and this was by far the most profitable and easy work. I could easily earn between $100-$150 USD in a day with 2-3 hours of effort. Compared to other typical student jobs, doing the writing gigs was a no-brainer. Less time. More money. Can do it while lightly multitasking (listening to podcasts, etc). For a student, I lived very comfortably. In fact, my first year in a 'real' job, I actually made less money than I did when I was writing college students' essays. I constantly feel like I should be more ashamed of myself for enabling others to cheat, but I have difficulty mustering much regret about it. There are only a handful of types of people that are willing to pay $10-20/page for some nicely-formatted, double-spaced drivel, and I don't think the fact that they sometimes (or maybe always) cheated makes a difference in the long run. I'd regularly engage my clients in discussions and look at their online identity to see who exactly I was working for. The super-majority of customers appeared to be wealthy foreign students that, though they would present a good rough outline of what they wanted in an essay, lacked the English skills to turn the outline into a readable document. These were typically students in engineering or hard science disciplines buying their way out of a 'core curriculum' class with little to no direct relevance to their discipline, and they generally viewed English communication skills as irrelevant to their future plans to return to their home country and practice whatever skill they picked up at a US university. The next most common 'type' of essay buyer was the business student that clearly was failed by whatever primary education system they were subjected to. Most were obviously from wealthy backgrounds, but a surprising number seemed to be poor and desperate to keep their head above water. This type of client usually had abysmal written communication skills despite being a native English speaker, and often struggled to provide any sort of coherent guidance in terms of what they expected in the essay that would be delivered. I eventually began charging this type of client double what I would charge the latter sort, because their sheer inability to convey what they wanted or needed would in turn make my life difficult. They were also the most likely to complain or demand last-minute edits. Out of this category of client, the people with family wealth and connections have a better-than-average chance of success regardless; the people desperately paying to offload their essays to pass a course will either be forced to improve their own skill-sets and knowledge, or end up sinking to whatever level of work is appropriate for them. I have a hard time believing that selling either sort of student an essay or two radically impacts their life prospects, or the prospects of other students (that might be subject to a grade curve somehow influenced by my work).

underseacables 5y ago

Recently I met a guy who confessed to cheating his way through college by paying bribes to inferno graduate students. It was only five years ago, but he said that the university charged such outrageous tuition for these international students, that mini were so desperate for money that they saw no qualms about stealing exams, taking exams, and writing his papers. It made me ponder for a bit if the current university system created their own mess.