Via Dennis Mangan, I found a piece from The Chronicle of Higher Education written by a guy who sells term papers to college students for cash:
…In the past year, I’ve written roughly 5,000 pages of scholarly literature, most on very tight deadlines. But you won’t find my name on a single paper.
I’ve written toward a master’s degree in cognitive psychology, a Ph.D. in sociology, and a handful of postgraduate credits in international diplomacy. I’ve worked on bachelor’s degrees in hospitality, business administration, and accounting. I’ve written for courses in history, cinema, labor relations, pharmacology, theology, sports management, maritime security, airline services, sustainability, municipal budgeting, marketing, philosophy, ethics, Eastern religion, postmodern architecture, anthropology, literature, and public administration. I’ve attended three dozen online universities. I’ve completed 12 graduate theses of 50 pages or more. All for someone else.
You read that right. Convincing term papers and theses on dozens of disciplines can be written by a guy who isn’t formally educated in any of them and who uses nothing more than Google for research. Still feel proud of that piece of paper on your wall?
Read the rest, if you’re up to it. The author says he’s retiring because he’s tired of being complicit in fraud, which is why I compared him to Andrew Lahde, he of the infamous “You Stupid Fucks Let Me Rob You Blind” letter.
Let’s recap. We force young people to take out tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans to go to college to avoid having to work for minimum wage for the rest of their lives. Half of them won’t graduate at all, meaning they won’t ever be able to pay off the debt they’ve incurred. A significant percentage of the rest are paying other people to do their work for them because they can’t or won’t learn the material themselves. They too have loans to pay off, which inhibits them from getting married and starting families until long after they graduate, and in the case of men, forever should they wise up to the current misandrist legal climate. Of course, this is assuming they can even get a decent-paying job to begin with.
In other words, our young people are taking on obscene levels of debt to obtain educations that less than half of them (at the most conservative estimate) will benefit from in any way, and the overwhelming majority will not be able to pay for. Can anyone explain to me how this can NOT end badly?
Student loan jubilee NOW! Or we’re totally fucked.
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In the UK at least, too many people are going to university. There is a point to degrees which do not formally teach students vocational skills and knowledge, but the usefulness is restricted to the (comparatively) highly intelligent.
The blame lies with unimaginative politicians, who rightly understood that service economies need an educated workforce, but decided to expand the existing elitist system to students who would not be able to usefully gain from it. What they should have done is expand the polytechnic colleges, which instead were turned into joke universities, now about to close with the introduction of market forces into tuition fees.
It’s a very minor point, but the bankster’s name is Andrew Lahde with an ‘a’ not an ‘e’.
Later marriages and later kids means fewer future taxpayers to support social welfare. Ties in nicely to that recent article.
Incidentally, I too have written papers for untalented undergrads for a fee, but stopped because the money wasn’t good enough and the agency tried to get me to pay me on an hourly basis. My understanding though is that this unethical practise was used mainly by international students who couldn’t write English particularly well, and just wanted a UK degree to return to their home country with.
Here’s an article about the whole scam:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2007/apr/03/highereducation.students
Yup, the intelligent and industrious individual can attain a college education all by himself in this Age of Online Information. What a shock.
Years ago a friend of mine owned an agency the ghostwrote academic papers including Ph.D. dissertations. She personally wrote dozens of dissertation for students at top universities in the U.S.A. including U of Chicago, Northwestern, etc.. All were accepted without a problem. She concluded that no one cared at the “finest” universities.
Your conclusion would be valid if there was an equal distribution of students failing to graduate, failing to learn their material, or graduating with a useless degree that did not enable them to pay back their loans across majors, ethnic groups, and so on. This is not so. As you can see from the article, most of the students the guy is writing for are “urban” (and the comments are full of SWPLs hilariously dickdancing around saying “black”,) or ESL. They are mostly majoring in Public Self-Exploration, i.e., communication, journalism, education, etc. The solution is not to forgive them their debts-it’s to let the system hollow out and collapse, until the market value of a degree, up to and including a PhD, in these idiotic fields coincides with its true value-nothing. Let these morons be stuck with their mountains of debt that they spend their potential childbearing years repaying from a job earning $30K a year before taxes and appletinis. This is eugenic. The ones who took up a trade instead of going to school, or went to school for something worthwhile, will have money to spare and spend it raising kids. Thus, our country’s main problem (too many over-credentialed, over-opinionated SWPLs with nothing of value to add to anyone’s existence, colluding with the great unwashed to vote themselves a bigger slice of the pie at the expense of the productive classes) will solve itself in a couple of generations. The law that anything you consume, including an education, must first be created, and must be paid for, is not to be trifled with.
BTW, the complementary piece to this article is here: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/01/lost-in-the-meritocracy/3672/
Well, at least I wrote all my own papers and master’s thesis, but my lack of talent really shows in the B’s and C’s I got on most of them (even in subjects that I really enjoyed and approached with gusto)–and I went to schools that were pretty well regarded, and not just diploma mills. Fortunately I got enough scholarship/fellowship money and tuition breaks that I didn’t emerge from the experience burdened by overwhelming debt.
I’m approaching retirement and have had many occasion to regret both my so-called professional career in which I have hardly distinguished myself, as well as the years I spent in the higher education blob. I wish I had never gone to college, let alone grad school. If you are on the edge aptitude-wise, like I was, don’t do it, or at least do it at night and try to work for a company that will pay for it over a longer period.
Science and engineering degrees are still useful. They are hard to fake as they require lab work. You will note that the ghost writer has not written anything relating to technical degrees.
“history, cinema, labor relations, pharmacology, theology, sports management, maritime security, airline services, sustainability, municipal budgeting, marketing, philosophy, ethics, Eastern religion, postmodern architecture, anthropology, literature, and public administration”
Nothing but the pseudo-sciences.
You can write anything in these pseudo-sciences as long as you don’t disrupt the status quo and as long as you don’t show any innovative tendency. Just quote older ‘authorities’, add some new finds, and eliminate contradictory evidence; that’s what you need to get an MA or a PhD.
Check my guest post on AD’s blog:
http://dissention.wordpress.com/2010/11/15/guest-post-by-nestorius-nov-15-2010/
There are a number of startups that a providing accredited degrees at much lower cost online. 2Tor.com is just one of them.
As the higher-ed bubble pops, wasteful departments that promote misandry and Marxism will get cut. Hence, the education bubble is one of the forces propping up with misandry bubble.
Just not useful for finding a job. STEM work is hard to come by.
So, bullshit degrees are easily done By the Power of Google? Shocking.
I mean, really, how hard is to figure what college degrees are worth it? (Hint, none except hard sciences with real world applications).
Hiaving a piece of paper to prove that you can kiss-ass too is bullshit.
Just not useful for finding a job. STEM work is hard to come by.
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maybe re-locate to india or china where your hard sciences training will be appreciated in the national defense sector of those countries.
When I worked at a university I had access to their network and gave the dog a degree. Fido is officially a doctor now.
I have been paid to write architecture papers, a subject I know nothing about and they are supposed to require technical competence. Its even worse than writing your own assignments because you give less of a shit about someone else’s paper in a boring subject than you do about your own paper that you know is a joke.
But, the money was good. The only papers I don’t think I could forge are math assignments. Medicine and law papers are so easy its a joke.
I have a STEM degree and I have more opportunities than I have interest in pursuing.
Just because you got a degree in computer science from Sacramento State University with a 2.3 GPA doesn’t entitle you to a 100K job. You have to have some actual talent and gumption to be successful.
The solution is not a student load jubilee. The solution is to abolish student loans. That will force down the cost of college.
The future of education is far lower cost recorded video lectures, learning software that incorporates the results from learning research, and lots of standardized tests for earning certifications of knowledge. The classical university should fade in importance.
Actually, said individual would have trouble finding a 40k job. With a more suitable GPA at that. Especially in CA.
Your point basically boils down to ‘Exceptional STEM graduates with work experience earned when finding work was much easier a decade or more ago can find work today’. Fucking shocking revelation. Yes, thank you, I have seen all of the Junior Draftsmen et al postings looking for guys with postgrad + 6 years experience. Lol no. I suppose those do technically count as ‘opportunities’ although it’s sort of like McDonald’s looking for MBAs.
So by all means, pursue STEM careers if you can get into Caltech. Otherwise foad. If you are going to a State college, polytechnic, et cetera then you won’t find a job, because there aren’t enough STEM related jobs and too many people going to college even in STEM fields.
Or learn Chinese I suppose.
I’d hazard to guess it’s easier to find related work with one of these bullshit pseudosciene degrees actually.
Piker.
I taught religion at the university level, want to know how I built my undergrad lectures?
Wikipedia.
I shit you not. It was just easier to have the points all boiled down beforehand, rather than to boil ‘em down myself.
And yet I had the rep as the person doing the hardest intro classes.
I’m not too surprised by this happening, even at the grad level, and I could really show a person how to write a fake essay, and areas that would be impossible to fake (yes, you can’t fake ‘em all).
K(yle),
I know guys doing IT tech support who are making in the upper 5 figures. Software developers make more than tech support people (knock on wood). You can make a decent living in STEM without going to CalTech.
Mind you, I only know US West Coast. Probably Silicon Valley has the highest salaries. That is consistent with what I know about people who work there.
I manage a group of software engineers in Silicon Valley. I am making offers to candidates finishing up their masters degrees in computer science at $95K plus $30K worth of cash and stock signing bonuses. And I don’t get them all: I had a guy turn me down a couple of weeks ago because he wanted to work at Apple.
I’ll concede that I’m hiring hotshots: the top 5% of students out of the top 5% of schools. However, there are jobs out there if you’re good.
To be good you don’t have to go to a top school: there’s plenty of other avenues. One guy I work with came from a poor redneck family and only went to a state school, but managed to convince a major publisher to publish his book on using perl while he was still in college. Others went to middle-of-the-road schools but won national programming competitions. One guy we hired from a state school had started his own business selling iphone apps (and made some fair change) while he was still a student. He loved my company and really wanted to get in. His plan if we didn’t hire him was to just do freelance consulting for which he already had some offers from people that had seen his apps. The guys with gumption, ambition and talent will always rise to the top.
I’ve seen recessions as bad or worse than this one come and go. The early nineties was hell for finding a job, too. If you’re aggressive you can ass-and-elbows your way into a job. If you sit in your apartment, smoke weed, play xbox and whine about the job market then you won’t find a job. Fucking shocking revelation.
As I said at Mangans, this article strikes me as, if not completely fabricated, a composite of several people. I am skeptical that anyone could write credibly on all those subjects, even with the aid of Google.
Note comment #9:
“The author admits to an aversion to math, and I am not surprised. He claims to have written more than 5000 pages in the last year. At roughly 250 working days per year, that’s 20 pages a day, every single working day. In an eight-hour working day, that’s close to 1000 words every hour, with no time allowed for client contact, follow-up, research or anything else. This seems unlikely in the extreme. Even with more hours put in each day, that is an improbably high speed of writing, considering that it has to be kept up every hour of every working day to make the total claimed in this article.”
@greenlander: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/01/comp_sci_graduates_need_more_skills/
I agree with Tarl. There’s no way anyone fabricating college theses and term papers could finish 20 pages a day, even if the subject is total BS.
“There’s no way anyone fabricating college theses and term papers could finish 20 pages a day, even if the subject is total BS.”
When I was an undergrad, I could crank out a 20-page paper in one night–in certain subjects, at least (History, English, Political Science).
@Jake Turner
Is there any way one could get in touch with these “academic guns for hire” (like you). Instead of being paid to cheat, being paid to teach and or pass on your skills?
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