Saturday, March 16, 2019

Building A Successful Higher Ed Business…So Corrupt Anyone Can Do It.






By Professor Doom



     As I may be going into early/brief retirement, allow me to share some insights on building a successful business in an industry I know a bit about: higher education. Also, the recent revelation of wildly unqualified students getting into Ivy League schools brought this to mind, as I bet many of you are wondering how these kids manage to do the work in these elite college courses. Read on to learn how!

     There are three main ways to go for a higher education business.

      The first way is to build a full school. This is worth nothing unless you can get accredited; this can take a few years, but will open the floodgates of student loan money. It’s ridiculous just how much money is involved here, but unless you have the political connections to get degree-granting status, the money to keep the school open for a few years when you don’t have the revenue coming in, and the money to either build a campus (not recommended) or set up a fully online system, this isn’t an option for a typical reader. You could probably set it up for under three million dollars, though, making it all back twice over within a decade.

       The second way doesn’t require much money, but requires more knowledge: tutoring. I’m ambivalent about even recommending this as a business. Yes, I’ve made good money tutoring, but not so much these last few years. The problem seems to be people don’t need to know much anymore. As coursework gets watered down, as grading becomes easier, as colleges mandate 80% of the class passes no matter what, knowing test material just doesn’t matter so much. That said, if you do know a subject, and it’s something in demand (math mostly, and Education never), then tutoring is a great way to make a little money on the side.

       But now comes my slam dunk business. I know it’s a great idea because not once have I seen my business idea fail (it’s not an original idea). Rarely, an accredited school may close, and tutors come and go…but not this one.

       The great idea?  A paper writing website. There are only a few dozen sites operating right now, as near as I can tell, so there’s room for more. It’s a great deal--you still get to take advantage of that sweet student loan money! There’s a weird balance to student loan money paying tuition, and also paying the student to hire someone to do the work so the student passes the class, thereby not “wasting” the tuition money. So let’s talk about what you need for this business.

     First, you need to set up a website. It’s not that tough, here are a bunch of great option:




     The days where you need to know HTML to set up a web page, much less a business, are long over, and the above gives you plenty of easy options. As far as what, exactly, to put on your site, start small: just do college paper writing. Some sites give options to take the whole college course, but let’s just focus on the easy part.



About 466,000,000 results



       Now, what to put on your site, what to charge, etc.? Well, just type in “college paper writing service” into Google and click on one or two, or all 466,000,000 options to get some ideas. In fact, spend some money on “research” and buy some custom-written papers from one of those sites, to get a feel for what’s going on here.

     Now, you’re probably thinking, “But Professor Doom, I can’t write college papers, I don’t know much about anything, and don’t write well anyway. This isn’t a business for me!”

      Au contraire. You have two options.

     First, you can hire writers cheaply. When I first started writing professionally (for magazines, not college papers), I’d get around 10 cents a word, with articles ranging from 500 to 1500 words, for the most part. Nowadays pay runs around a penny a word. Because we’ve slammed most everyone into college, we’ve massively overproduced people who can write college papers. Supply and demand means pay for writers is very low.

      Finding the writers is easy enough, too. You can place cheap ads on education-related websites and such. We have such a massive glut of marginally employed (at best) academics that you’ll get many applicants in no time at all, many of them grossly underpaid college professors looking to make ends meet.

     But there’s an easier way: subcontract it all.

     If you’ve done your homework (thereby putting you way ahead of your customers), you’ve gone to several of the sites Google showed you, you know their prices, you know their turnaround times, and you’ve done a little business with them to see which are reliable enough.

       So, make the prices on your site slightly higher, and turnaround times slightly longer. Most of the customers coming to your site are lazy (there’s a reason why they’re hiring you to do their work for them, after all…), they’re not going to shop around. They’ll pay your price, and tell you what they want.

     Then you go and place the order with another site, get the paper written from them, and pass it right on to your customer! This is a business idea so easy quite literally anyone can do this.

      Now, you’re probably thinking, “Isn’t this fraud? I mean, if I set up a hamburger business right behind a McDonald’s, then sold McDonald’s food to my customers after ordering and carrying it from that other restaurant, wouldn’t that be a problem?”

     It sure would. Thing is, McDonald’s is a legitimate (bear with me) business…they’d have a legitimate beef (pun intended) with you selling their food and passing it off as your own, and the courts would see it their way.

     But the college paper writing businesses are not legit. They completely operate off the fraudulent largesse of the student loan scam, which has brought a great number of “students” uninterested in academic work onto campus, and loaned them the money to do it. Unlike McDonald’s, their papers aren’t branded, in fact, their whole business is based on creating product which is untraceable (and thus won’t be discovered via plagiarism-detecting software).

     Besides, you’re actually a more legitimate customer than usual for such sites, sites, since you’re not actually buying papers which you’ll misrepresent as your work in a college course. If anything, you’ve got a case for being one of the very few (if any) people using these college paper writing “services” for legit-ish purposes.

     As long as the student loan scam exists, my business model of leeching off the college paper writing industry leeching off the student loan scam would be successful.

Admin: “You need to put more writing assignments in your math courses.”

--I received such directives many times when teaching at a fake CC.



      Allow me to take a few moments to summarize the level of fraud the student loan scam has reached. While any chucklehead knows full well that these “college paper writing services” exist only to defraud higher education, our administrators have done nothing, for years, to stop any of it, and a case could easily be made that they’ve encouraged the fraud to a considerable extent.

        Well, of course they have, our administrative class is paid for by the student loan scam, as is the students’ tuition, as are the papers purchased by these services. All I’m proposing is to simply add one more level of crap to the fraud…would it really make this cesspool more foul?






    

4 comments:

  1. I gather from your opening that your health has not improved. I am very sorry to hear that. I have greatly enjoyed your comments over the years and I believe gained a much better understanding of the US higher ed system. On this St Patrick's Day may I wish to a full recovery and a long enjoyable life

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    1. Thanks for the wishes...a CT on Monday, and a looooooong wait for results, will give me some clues, maybe.

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  2. We are all very concerned about your health, Doom. I hope if you retire, you settle in and write a book about yourself, that is, stories about your classes and your battles with administrators. Seriously, that is a story you should tell, even if you have to change names and dates and make it a novel. Good luck!

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    1. Well, my book (see link, top right) covers a good deal of it (and if you can't spare $10, you can read my blog from the beginning, as the contents are there). But the issues I've experienced are not unique: many colleges are filled with corruption and incompetence.

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