In Hong Kong, 24-year-old entrepreneur “Jay” was brainstorming ideas to make some cash.

On the other side of the world in Britain, his friend and former schoolmate “Nick” was struggling to get his university homework done.

In a moment, a deal was struck. Nick paid Jay HK$500 ($64) to do his statistics homework. Jay earned Nick top marks.

It wasn’t just math. Soon, Jay was writing essays for other students in Britain. Nick helped to find clients for Jay, and as the orders for assignments grew, Jay began to loop in a few other friends as writers for their expanding business.

In less than three years, Nick and Jay have developed a thriving sideline. They have completed more than 90 essays for around 40 students from over six universities in Britain.

But their operation is just the tip of the iceberg of a flourishing industry of homework guns for hire, a practice known in China as dai xie – “ghostwriting.”

More Chinese students have turned to overseas universities in recent years, with their numbers hitting a record 600,000 in 2017.

Studying overseas retains a significant cachet for many in China, and it can also represent an easier path than competing in the grueling nationwide university entrance exam to get into China’s top colleges.

But education experts say that many of the Chinese students who go overseas do not necessarily have the language proficiency to meet the challenges of college education in a foreign language, and so some of them turn to a market of ghostwriters.

There’s no concrete data on the number of Chinese students who use these services, which are not illegal in the UK.

But the rise of ghostwriting business inside and outside the country has put academic honesty at stake, casting doubts on the credibility of degrees attained by Chinese students from foreign universities.

According to private research center Whole Ren Education, 35% of expulsions of Chinese students overseas between 2013 and 2018 were due to academic dishonesty.

Across the globe, contract cheating is on the rise, with as many as one in seven graduates having paid someone else to do a university assignment for them, according to Professor Philip Newton, director of learning and teaching at Swansea University in Wales.

Newton said that as many as 31 million learners worldwide might have employed contract essay writers.

Twenty-two-year-old Hongkonger “Chloe” got into the trade last year to earn money for a holiday in Tibet.

The graduate of a top Hong Kong university charges HK$1 (13 cents) per word and says she easily earns about US$1,000 a month during peak essay seasons.

Her other freelance work in translation, copywriting and tutoring brings in about the same amount but the student essay jobs have several advantages.

“Ghostwriting is much more flexible and it gives you a larger one-time profit,” she said.

“You also learn more from it than tutoring primary school kids, where you keep giving and learn nothing in return.”

Chloe’s word rate is lower than that charged by Nick and Jay, whose clients pay HK$1.20 (15 cents) per word on average, depending on the subject and urgency.

Nick and Jay take a 40% cut for commission, proofreading and administration.

Writers who consistently get good marks can earn well.

Jay said one of the best writers in his stable was paid $2,500 to write an 8,000-word dissertation – about a third more than the $1,840 average monthly salary earned by a fresh graduate in Hong Kong.

“Emma,” a Chinese graduate from a university in Britain’s East Midlands, said that the practice was widespread among Chinese students at her university.  

“It was the atmosphere that made you want to hire a ghostwriter. When everyone around you did it, why wouldn’t you do it too?”

And it isn’t hard to find people to do it, either. She said her university email account was often flooded with ads for such services, some of them written in Chinese to reach the 95,000 or so Chinese students studying in the country.

One of the ads was from a company called KJ Essay in which it claimed to have completed 62,570 orders in the nine years it had been running. On December 12, a popular online sales day in China, the company offered discounts, including £20 (US$26) off any essay – although no minimum grade was guaranteed.

In China, the government has been fighting to crack down on ghostwriting, an industry which has been estimated to be worth almost $1.5 billion. In July last year, the Education Ministry announced that students who submitted academic essays written by ghostwriters would be expelled.

As yet, there’s been no word on how successful the measure has been.

Chris Havergal, the news editor of the Times Higher Education magazine, urged Western universities to be more proactive in combating contract cheating to protect their own standards.

“The integrity of the qualifications offered by leading Western universities is central to their appeal to international students, so combating contract cheating should be a priority for institutions and policymakers,” he said.