Boston Magazine has a nice piece this month on the big business that has developed around the college admissions essay.

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.

The college admissions frenzy is an issue that we've touched on in 02138 several times, most notably in Raising Harvard, which we (mostly) meant as satire but turned out to be more real than farce. (Which is itself sort of farcical, if you follow.) But it seems there's no end to which parents and young people won't go to get their children/themselves into Harvard and other fine schools. Wouldn't it be better if they put as much effort into thinking about why they want to go to college, and why they want to go to a specific college, as they did into thinking about how to get in?

It would be a fine thing to discourage these kids from relying upon ghostwriters to do their work for them. (How one could do that, I'm not sure.)

But it's a difficult message to send when so many Harvard professors do exactly the same thing.....