Parents pay $10K to get kids ‘published’ for college apps

Parents willing to write a big check have long been able to hire someone to write a college application essay or take the SAT for their kid.

But now there’s a hot new admissions ploy on offer: For a mere $10,000, you can transform your teen into a published author in a peer-reviewed journal.

According to a recent report from ProPublica, a cottage industry has exploded to help 17-year-old college hopefuls differentiate themselves in the ever more competitive admissions process as “acclaimed researchers.”

More than 10,000 high school students have funneled through dozens of online programs such as Scholar Launch and Lumiere Education, which pair them with academic mentors to churn out research papers which are then published by research journals.

Kids able to pay for the qualification can then tack “published author” onto their resumé.

There’s a surprisingly long list of journals fielding high school paper submissions for a fee, with acceptance rates ranging from 5% up through 80%.

According to ProPublica, some of these journals are even affiliated with the research bootcamps themselves — meaning the same people helping kids write their papers are also involved in deciding whether they get published.

And it’s no secret that this is an admissions tactic.

Research programs prominently display the admissions results of clients on their websites.

For instance, Scholar Launch boasts that their “alumni” have gained admissions to the likes of Harvard, Oxford, Princeton and Stanford.

Sophia, a 17-year-old high-school junior who conducted what I’m sure was groundbreaking research into Chick-fil-A’s marketing strategy for her own project, told ProPublica that being a “researcher” is common, if not cliché: “Nowadays, having a publication is kind of a given. If you don’t have one, you’re going to have to make it up in some other aspect of your application.”

Sophia has yet to receive any admissions decisions, but she’s right that these sorts of pay-to-play tactics are becoming more and more common.

I witnessed many of them myself when I attended a boarding school teeming with Ivy League hopefuls.

The school was like a factory line, taking in unpolished teenagers and churning out ready-made college applicants, each with a “story” to tell admissions counselors.

I saw every ploy in the college admissions playbook — from kids flying to developing countries for a photo op of them “building” schools while local handymen did the actual heavy lifting, to a sudden epidemic of learning disabilities that conveniently coincided with standardized testing season and gave students extra time taking the SAT or ACT.

Had these ready-made research startups been around when I was applying to colleges six years ago, I’m confident some of my peers would have taken advantage.

The college admissions process has long-been a “Who do you know?” and “How much can you pay?” contest.

But it only promises to get worse as schools dump what few objective measures are left in the admissions process.

Grades have inflated to the point that the average high school GPA is 3.39.

Meanwhile, in the post-pandemic era, more than 75% of colleges, including even Harvard University, have dropped SAT and ACT requirements.

If everyone has A’s and nobody took the ACT, it’s no wonder students are more desperate than ever to differentiate themselves in the application process — even if that means writing a phony research paper about buttery Chick-fil-A buns.

High schoolers are half-baked adolescents still figuring out who they are — and yet the college admissions process is forcing them to be fully-formed, academically-published researchers before they can even get a driver’s license.

It’s a broken system that’s incentivizing young people to cynically market themselves, rather than actually find themselves.

Any teenager who is genuinely publishing peer-reviewed papers on their own volition is one-in-a-million —and possibly a savant.

Congratulations to them — I hope they get into Harvard.

The rest of these peer-reviewed teens are the product of over-eager parents and a pressure-cooker system that favors performative accolades over actual grit.