The Rise of the Outsourced Admissions Essay

Admissions staff at Harvard, as well as at Amherst, Tufts, Boston University, and UMass Amherst, declined to discuss how essay-editing services affect their decision-making process. But several schools said they don’t think essay editing is corrupting the standards of elite education. “Remember, an essay is one component of a college application,” says Colin Riley, a BU spokesman. “It is not a determining factor. So while it’s important, no wonderfully written essay is going to alter the academic transcript or the recommendations from the teacher or the counselor or their standardized test scores.”

MIT is the only top-tier school in town that’s willing to condemn essay editing on the record. That’s because recently an essay-editing company had the audacity to directly e-mail Ben Jones, an MIT admissions officer, asking for advice on what he was looking for. Bemused, Jones blogged his response on the MIT admissions website. “The rules are simple,” he wrote. “Write your own essays.”

“Having one’s essay rewritten by someone else to the point that a reader wouldn’t recognize the original is unethical, yes,” he says, “but the more important issue is that applicants who engage in this sort of activity are really missing the point. At MIT, we’re looking, quite simply, for the applicant’s voice.”

Amherst director of admissions Tom Parker says he’s less concerned about individual essay scofflaws than about the broader implications of the trend. “What I worry about more is increasing the kind of cynicism that surrounds the whole process. Part of me wants to say, ‘Let’s just not admit anybody from any of these places where we know that students are doing this.’ I’ve never done that and never will do that, but there are times when I really want to say, ‘You know, we really don’t need these kids.’”

At least for now, ferreting out the professionally tweaked imposters from the authentic essays isn’t high on the to-do list of most admissions committees. But even if it were, essay editing has become such an unavoidable part of the application process, and such a vital source of employment for recent Ivy League grads, that it’s probably here to stay. “It’s like steroid use,” says the editor for the Writing Center. “You can’t compete unless you use it.”