Sooner than later there will be a comprehensive outing and crack down on enterprises ghostwriting papers for students and on the students paying for those services. After all, Harvard recently suspended students for merely collaborating on a take-home exam. Suppose a reporter for the campus newspaper THE CRIMSON answered several of the many help-wanted on Craigslist recruiting contract ghostwriters for these papers, at $8 to $15 per page and then published the expose?
Experienced businesspeople recognize the perils of the niche they are in. Therefore they word their ads and their consumer promotions as a kind of "coaching" or editing service. One outfit in Pennsylvania, which incidentally pays the least ($8), hammers the "coaching" aspect, including in interviews with prospective ghostwriters. The deliverable supposedly provides the student with the model of how a well-written paper on the subject would be organized and documented. Yes, ghostwriters must have down cold AP, APA, MLA, and Chicago style guides.
Obviously, the businessperson who put this help wanted on the New York section of Craigslist - read it here - is a newbie or, unlike the rest of us, never went to law school and became hyper-cautious about wording. The help wanted starts out:
"I write college papers for students & get a lot of business."
Then there is a laundry list of sterling qualities the ghostwriter must have in order to be able to produce the quality demanded by the owner. All that for $10 a page.
The task entails research, usally requiring access to a university library with its databases of academic journals. This is no simple job of putting a few keywords in search engines to retrieve what THE NEW YORK TIMES and THE ECONOMIST opine on the topic.
Then the material must be organized and presented in an academic tone, usually with all the careful documented argumentation that professors demand.
The next responsibility is to follow the conventions of the style guide in formatting the manuscript. One guide might have no double spaces between paragraphs. Another might indent each paragraph so many spaces.
The next to last is to insert the text notes, foot notes, and end notes, along with a bibliography (sometime annotated), according to the exact specifications of the style guide.
Then there is proofreading the manuscript.
So, suppose it is a five-page paper. That means with one outfit which pays $8 a page, the ghostwriter earns $40 or with the $10-a-page outfit, $50. With the research, thinking, organizing, writing, documentation, and proofreading, that could work up to well below minimum wage.
At the very least everyone in the loop is engaging in an unethical activity. Depending on the policies and procedures of the particular academic institution, it could also be against the law and constitute fraud.
If I were a parent ponying up about $50,000 a two-semester year to educate my child, I would join in class-action lawsuit with other parents who contend their children are being defrauded of their training in critical thinking and expository writing. The defendants would include the miscreants in the ghostwriting mills, the professor who didn't smell this out, and the academic institution. The lawsuit could be a Jane Doe kind so as not to get their own children stigmatized as cheats.
Full disclosure: I worked a few days in a supposed "coaching service" and then recognized the pickle I could be. That was that.