HS students pay to conduct research, co-author journal articles to support applications: Opinion

In a recent editorial for the Chronicle of Higher Ed, Daniel Golden and Kunal Purohit discuss a “new admissions ploy” where high school students’ parents pay to help their children become published authors of journal articles to support their university applications. In the US context, the authors explain that the practice stems from the desire to make a student’s application stand out when SAT and ACT test scores are increasingly made optional or dropped and grade inflation is prevalent. “I think it was important,” said one student who was admitted to a top US university after paying $550 USD to publish a manuscript in time for their application. “I didn’t have much leadership in school so [I] needed other ways to get better extracurriculars.” The authors discuss the impact of this on research journals, the postsecondary sector, and on students’ perspectives on how research is conducted.