Ah, and another screen that firms use for potential employees turns to mush.
It's a really interesting situation to think about. If these foreigners (from places with much less opportunity) are able to produce work of this caliber (while the students paying for them are either unable or unwilling), it makes one wonder whether those foreigners should be in the students' places. For a long time, one's success was more a function of where one was lucky enough to be located rather than one's ability. Manufacturing workers in America would be paid better than skilled labor in less fortunate areas. However, that seems to be breaking down as advances in communication and transportation tear down the old barriers.
I can't imagine this situation staying indefinitely - those writing the essays must know that they are getting a pittance in return for the gains they're helping the students achieve. How long will people accept being outsourced to while others realise the gains of their hard work? That sounded a lot more "the people will rise up" than I meant. Like, it's one thing to be offered less than the value of your production - corporations won't take the risk of us not producing value without that and we, in exchange, get guaranteed revenue. It's a fine situation and I'm personally happy to have the stability. However, in this case the students getting their degrees are potentially gaining a few million in lifetime earnings and these essay writers are getting a paltry $2-3 per page. Sooner or later, more of the people with these skills will want to compete with those students - given the chance.
I think you have a valid point about exploited labor, but I think you're conflating education and essay writing.
An educational degree is supposed to be about learning, not about of how many tests you have taken, homework assignments completed, essays turned in. I mean, when I was in college, I was highly aware of my credit requirements too and planned for them. My point is that the tests, the assignments, credit requirements all are simply proxy measurements of learning. Learning is what really matters. By gaming the system, and skipping the actual learning, the rich and lazy students are not getting anything in return either.
I guess it's a little naive but I'd like to believe that if you really got nothing out of your education, it will show. The paper only gets you so far.
But everything's a proxy for everything. Employers don't really want educated employees, they just use the college degree as a proxy for the skills and qualities they actually want. The college degree itself doesn't certify learning or the qualities desired by employers; it just certifies that you found a way to make it through college. Ultimately, anything anybody does is largely based on luck, their ability to game the system, who their friends are, etc. If some rich kid has an essay written for him, he's just equaling out the luck some other rich kid had in getting an easy teacher.
Personally, I found that my ability to write papers decreased as I wrote more of them. In that sense, I didn't learn anything by writing; in fact, I unlearned things. Maybe I would be a better writer if I had outsourced my papers.
A chimp is still a chimp, even if it's wearing a business suit.
Basically, a moron will still be a moron even if they have all the paper to get into a job. There's no doubt a few people who can get by in a job despite not being the smartest, but once companies start catching on I expect there'll be lots more loop holes to fire people.
I simply can't imagine a Ph.D. situation in which the advisor knows so little about the candidate that this would actually work. I could maybe see if the candidate did the work but wanted help with the 'wordsmithing' that s/he could pull it off. But even then. An alert advisor would get suspicious, I would think.
Maybe the word alert in the above sentence is where it breaks down.
I don't understand how somebody could actually hand in a PhD dissertation from one of these places. Are there really schools where nobody would be suspicious that the student hadn't been working on this particular dissertation before they handed in the final version?
I suspect this to be in the genre of the ask-for-something-impossible-on-rentacoder-and-see-what-happens experiments. Don't PhD candidates have to get their proposals accepted by their advisors and then have periodic reviews during the process?
Even at many top grad schools, hardly any dissertation will be rejected. If you spend a long time there, grad schools will often be eager to hand you a PhD for a junky dissertation just to get you out the door.
Really? From what I've seen, if it's that junky that will request major revisions in the hope to either deter you enough just to quit, or to encourage you enough to clean it up.
There are some "diploma mills" where the only qualification for your phd is a large check and a dissertation sized paper. It doesn't surprise me that these are farmed out to essay mills.
On a side note, I looked into writing for essay mills before, but the money wasn't worth it for me.
I cringed when I saw a quote by a student at my undergrad university. Not sure why anyone would respond to a reporter's inquiry on such a controversial topic that could get you expelled from school.
Delegation is a good skill for a manager, but you don't go to a technical university to learn skills like this. You can pick it up in real life. (Also, it's most certainly unethical to delegate something and take complete credit -- and that's what the essay mills are supporting.)
On the second point, the subjects already are engaging, it's just that people pick the wrong topics. If you think data structures are boring, don't get a computer science degree. If blood makes you ill, don't become a surgeon. If you think the law is boring, don't become a lawyer. Pick something that you enjoy, not something that you think will be "in demand" after you graduate. Predicting the future is not easy. Pick something you like instead.
1) A school should train for outsourcing? I don't understand why you would need to go to school for that.
2) You can't engage a student whose sole objective in life is the pursuit of money. Many, many students see universities as a path to greater income, nothing more. They have no interest in the subjects at hand.
Or an alternative is too just lock a class up for 3 days in a library while they write their essays (with not internet).
Take home assignments are usually a mess - what I did was to force people to write tests. If there are 3 people in a group and only one is working - it will also come out.
It's a really interesting situation to think about. If these foreigners (from places with much less opportunity) are able to produce work of this caliber (while the students paying for them are either unable or unwilling), it makes one wonder whether those foreigners should be in the students' places. For a long time, one's success was more a function of where one was lucky enough to be located rather than one's ability. Manufacturing workers in America would be paid better than skilled labor in less fortunate areas. However, that seems to be breaking down as advances in communication and transportation tear down the old barriers.
I can't imagine this situation staying indefinitely - those writing the essays must know that they are getting a pittance in return for the gains they're helping the students achieve. How long will people accept being outsourced to while others realise the gains of their hard work? That sounded a lot more "the people will rise up" than I meant. Like, it's one thing to be offered less than the value of your production - corporations won't take the risk of us not producing value without that and we, in exchange, get guaranteed revenue. It's a fine situation and I'm personally happy to have the stability. However, in this case the students getting their degrees are potentially gaining a few million in lifetime earnings and these essay writers are getting a paltry $2-3 per page. Sooner or later, more of the people with these skills will want to compete with those students - given the chance.