Tarpley Hitt

Photo Illustration by Sarah Rogers/The Daily Beast/Getty

Last week, the sting operation dubbed Operation Varsity Blues exposed more information on well-heeled and well-known parents who rigged the college-admissions process, in part if you are paying proctors and ringers to take or correct tests for their kids. Not even after news regarding the scheme broke, critics rushed to point out that celebrity parents like Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman did need to break n’t the law to game the system.

When it comes to ultra-rich, big contributions may get their name on a science building and their offspring an area at a top-tier school—an option California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently called “legal bribery.” Perhaps the moderately wealthy can grease the admissions process with extensive SAT tutoring or, more problematically, college application essay editing.

A 500-word essay submitted through the Common Application, about some foible or lesson, which aims to give readers a better sense of the student than, say, a standardized test score in the admissions process, there’s a high premium on the personal statement. One or more university and advising blog rank the essay among the “most important” components of the procedure; one consultant writing in The New York Times described it as “the purest part associated with application.”

But while test scores are completed by the student alone—barring bribed proctors, that is—any number of individuals can alter an essay before submission, opening it as much as exploitation and less-than-pure tactics at the hands of helicopter parents or college-prep that is expensive who appeal to the one percent.

In interviews with all the Daily Beast, eight college application tutors shed light in the economy of editing, altering, and, from time to time, outright rewriting statements that are personal. Leia mais