While applying to a master’s-degree program in clinical psychology at Columbia University, Maura Plante chose to focus on her future rather than her past. In the first draft of her application essay, she wrote about her desire to move away from corporate life — she had spent 13 years in various marketing positions — to pursue a passion for research on depression and domestic violence.
But then she hired Margo Bartsch, who called for a rewrite. Ms. Bartsch is an essay coach who lives in Burlington, Vt., and operates a Web site called College Essay Coach. She worked with Ms. Plante, then living in Florida, via phone and e-mail for several hours over the course of a month, at a rate of $75 per hour.
Ms. Bartsch got Ms. Plante to see that her adult experiences — her marketing career, her unfulfilled early desire to join the Foreign Service, her mastery of Mandarin Chinese and Spanish — had been driven by a deep need to connect with people. In the final version of her essay, Ms. Plante spoke proudly of her past and how it had prepared her for the close interactions that she would have as a clinical psychologist. Ms. Plante was admitted to Columbia’s program and will graduate next month.
“Margo helped me understand that you can’t walk away from your experiences and who you are,” says Ms. Plante, who never met with Ms. Bartsch in person. “I made clear to the admissions committee that I’m older, and I bring different things to bear. It would have been a mistake not to talk about my past.”
Essay coaches have been hanging out shingles since the early 1990s. The business has grown sharply over the past decade thanks to the ease of editing via the Internet and students’ desire to gain any possible edge as many colleges have become more selective.
The companies, with names like Cambridge Essay Service, EssayEdge, IvyEssays, and With Honors, often play up the elite-college pedigrees of their editors. Geoffrey Cookwho founded EssayEdge, one of the biggest essay-editing companies, while still an undergraduate at Harvard Universitytold The Philadelphia Inquirer in March that the company earned $6-million in revenue in 2002, the year he sold it to Peterson’s, a company best known for its college guidebooks.
Michael H. Fleischner, a marketing executive at Nelnet Enrollment Solutions, which now owns Peterson’s and EssayEdge, won’t provide information on profits or how many clients the company works with, but says that during its busy season, more than 200 editors work for EssayEdge.
Austin Brentley, a co-founder of With Honors, which claims to hire only honors graduates of Harvard as editors, says the industry’s growth is tied to the perception that a carefully crafted essay could make all the difference in the admissions process.
“By the time you’re ready to write the essay, most of your other materials, such as grades and test scores, are already set in stone,” he says. “The essay is the one last thing that you can really improve, enhance, and sell.”
Some of the essay-editing sites, including EssayEdge, are more likely to work with graduate- and professional-school applicants, like Ms. Plante, than with undergraduate applicants. Admissions officials may expect more from the essays written by these older students. Also, graduate-school applicants are less likely to get essay help from a parent or counselor. “The stakes may be a little higher,” Mr. Fleischner says. “These are students who have made a conscious decision to continue their education.”
The growing popularity of the Common Application — which was intended to relieve stress on applicants by allowing them to fill out fewer forms — may inadvertently be prompting more students to seek essay help. Nearly 300 colleges now accept the Common Application, twice as many as a decade ago. Students can choose among five essay topics.
“Students may be thinking, ‘How am I going to stand out if all these other kids are writing on the same topic?’” says Bill Conley, dean of enrollment and academic services at the Johns Hopkins University.
Prices for essay help range from $20 for basic proofreading to more than $1,000 for a soup-to-nuts package with brainstorming and multiple edits. (Some essay coaches offer separate packages to prepare students for the timed writing sample on the SAT.) That’s a bargain compared with fees charged by private counselors who provide a much broader range of services, helping students research colleges and prepare applications. Those services start at around $2,500 and in some cases can exceed $20,000.
The reputation of essay coaches has been soiled somewhat by sites that fail to take a hard line against plagiarism. ECheat.com, a site that features college-admission essays available for free download, informs visitors that plagia-rism is not permissible and that the site was created “to provide a reference for students writing papers.” But it also tells students that they will “most likely” not be caught if they submit one of its essays as their own because “most teachers are not very perceptive.” The site’s motto is: “It’s not cheating, it’s collaborating,” but the site never explains why it is called eCheat.com.
Four years ago, an admissions officer at Pomona College came across essays with identical passages from three different applicants. A Web search traced the source to a “sample” essay at EssayEdge. When Bruce J. Poch, Pomona’s vice president and dean of admissions, visited the site, he says, he saw no warnings against plagiarism. He also found it distasteful that Peterson’s — which publishes several college guidebooks for prospective students — had a prominent link on its own Web site advertising EssayEdge. Mr. Poch believed the company was playing on students’ fears to sell products from EssayEdge.
“It was like a warning to kids when they were just beginning to thumb through college guides,” Mr. Poch says. “It was saying, ‘This is something you’ve got to do.’” He called Peterson’s to complain about the site’s lack of warnings against plagiarism and later severed Pomona’s marketing contracts with Peterson’s, he says.
Mr. Fleischner, the Nelnet executive, says Peterson’s had just completed its acquisition of EssayEdge when Mr. Poch called, and that it responded within 24 hours to put language on the site warning students about plagiarism and making clear that they should not submit sample essays as their own work. Peterson’s Web site now promotes EssayEdge in a more understated manner, as part of a suite of services that students can use.
Mr. Fleischner defends the essay assistance the company provides, saying it helps “level the playing field.” “A lot of the people we work with don’t have parents who are college professors,” he says. “They’re the everyday student who needs a little extra help, and they can’t get it from their guidance counselor.”
Some admissions deans agree that the services can provide value. “Some of these kids have parents who don’t speak or write English, so they might use a service for help with brainstorming,” says Mr. Conley, the Johns Hopkins dean. “I’m willing to assume that some of their business is honest business.”
Ms. Bartsch, the Vermont essay coach, is also an adjunct instructor of marketing and advertising at Champlain College. She works with most of her clients in person and starts out by getting them to talk about well-known brands like Kodak and Google. She wants to drive home the point that feelings about brands can be just as important as product quality. Then she relates those lessons to the application essay.
“In writing good stories about yourself, it’s not about the four tires and the engine,” Ms. Bartsch says. “It’s about your experiences in life, and what you’ve learned from them. Admissions counselors want to hear how you feel.”
Some students say the cost of an essay coach is a small price to pay for reassurance on the part of the application that induces the most anxiety.
Sam Hamilton turned to With Honors in the fall of 2004 for help on an essay he would eventually submit to Harvard University. Mr. Hamilton, then a senior at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, had already written an essay about Ralph Bunche, the African-American who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950 for his work on an armistice agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians. Mr. Bunche was not a prominent leader in the American civil-rights movement, and Mr. Hamilton wrote that he had been “sadly forgotten” by modern-day black Americans because “he does not fit into our American categories of what an African-American hero should be.”
Mr. Hamilton is himself black but attended a largely white private high school and grew up in affluent Scarsdale, N.Y. He related his own struggles he has been called “Oreo” and “crossover” — to Mr. Bunche’s life. “I know that I am not the kind of African-American adolescent that Black society expects me to be, but neither was Ralph Bunche the type of Black leader that Black society expected him to be,” he wrote.
Mr. Hamilton’s parents and his school counselor had already looked over the essay by the time he heard about With Honors from a friend. Mr. Hamilton had structured his essay as a response to a comment about Bunche by the socialist and writer Michael Harrington. The company’s editors — With Honors promises that two Harvard honors graduates will read every essay — recommended that Mr. Hamilton cut some of the direct responses to Mr. Harrington. They thought that stylistic flourish detracted from the point the admissions office would be more interested in: how Mr. Hamilton saw himself in Bunche.
“Our goal is to help applicants produce the most polished piece they can,” says Mr. Brentley, the company’s co-founder. “They can be creative, but they have to stay within the boundaries of what’s acceptable in college admissions.”
The editors also suggested tightening a few sentences, and recommended that Mr. Hamilton introduce himself earlier in the essay, so that the opening graphs didn’t turn into a dry recitation of Bunche’s biography.
Mr. Hamilton had other strong points to his application — he had good grades and was an athlete, and both his father and a brother had attended Harvard, he said. Mr. Hamilton was admitted and is now a sophomore.
“Did the help from With Honors get me into Harvard?” he asks now. “No, I wouldn’t say that. No one person’s help can get you into any great school. But it definitely did give me that reassurance that I needed.”
http://chronicle.com Section: Admissions & Student Aid Volume 53, Issue 34, Page B11
