The Rise of the Outsourced Admissions Essay

It’s December, the height of college application season, and students across Massachusetts are hunched over their desks, putting the finishing touches on their college application essay. Traditionally, that essay has been viewed as a chance to break loose from the drone of dry figures and bullet points, and get to a place where unadulterated personality and a compelling story are enough to put a hopeful over the top. Or at least that was the case when students were still writing their own essays, which, increasingly, they aren’t.

So let’s start over.

It’s December, the height of college application season, and hundreds of anonymous Ivy League graduates are hunched over their desks, putting a shine on the personal statements of kids they’ve never met face-to-face, practicing their craft over the Internet, and for good money. Last year was the most competitive admissions season in history, and these freelance editors, and the multiplying number of firms they work for, are doing a booming business in this latest extension of what has come to be known as the “admissions industrial complex.” In an age in which SAT scores can be bumped up by buying a thousand-dollar test-prep course and parents will pay private academic counselors tens of thousands of dollars to help brand their kids for colleges, it should come as little surprise that there’s also a thriving trade in “perfect” application essays.

“It’s become a big industry,” says Chuck Hughes, cofounder of Road to College, a local admissions-consulting firm. Essay editing is just one of the services his company offers, but there are at least a dozen operations out there that do enough business in essay editing to make it their primary focus. The biggest, and a pioneer of the field, is EssayEdge: Now headquartered in New Jersey, it got its start in Cambridge, where it was founded in a Harvard dorm room in 1997. Several others are based locally, including All Ivy Educational Services, founded this spring in a Somerville apartment, and Cambridge Coaching, which is staffed by grad students at Harvard and MIT. The Writing Center, started by 2006 Harvard grad Nathan Labenz as a way to fund a year of travel abroad, was based here last summer, when Labenz was in town living with friends. “I’m just picking up the crumbs,” Labenz says. “I think this stuff is only getting crazier, partly because the Internet is making it easier.”

As the industry grows, however, so do concerns that these services, if not explicitly promoting plagiarism, at the very least run counter to the central mission of higher education. After all, helping students fake or exaggerate learning in order to gain access to more learning seems a little dubious. But some essay editors argue that such criticism is a bit…academic. What they’re doing, they claim, is merely responding to market pressure. “If clients are going to pay me a fortune to get into the system,” says one editor at the Writing Center, “I’m happy to reap the benefits.”

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