China’s new breed of academic paper mills promising a shortcut to grad school
Students can pay to get their independent research papers published, helping their applications stand out from the crowd
The agency’s advertisement promised just the kind of “cutting-edge” expertise that Chris Wong was looking for.
The 21-year-old arts student was aiming to get into a graduate programme overseas after completing his studies in Australia, and the “commercial research” firm could give him a ticket in.
For nearly 20,000 yuan (US$2,800), the Beijing-based agency would guide Wong through a three-month independent online course of study in his field to produce a research paper that would be published in a leading journal.
The paper would help him stand out from the ever-growing crowd competing for limited places in graduate programmes in China and abroad.
“I thought it would be better to have some extra academic knowledge and a solid paper as a sample for future applications,” he said.
The agency Wong signed up with is part of a rapidly expanding educational consulting sector that has cropped up to help ambitious students fine-tune their applications for graduate programmes or overseas schools.
With a record 12.22 million university graduates entering the already depressed labour market this year, more young people are delaying the job hunt in the hopes of improving their prospects later through further studies.
Competition for these graduate programmes in China is intense and most applicants must sit an exam to be considered. Others, though, can get in through a points system that gives credit to applicants with a published paper to their name.
The commercial research firms help students achieve this goal.
For a fee, the agencies will take clients through a course of independent study or a series of lectures and tutorials on a subject.
In these programmes, participants are required to work individually or in small groups to choose their own essay topics and write papers.
The company then handles the final step of submitting the papers to academic journals. In general, the higher the fee, the better the journal.
Often, the training will be overseen by a lecturer from a top university and will include an academic reference for the student to boost their chances of graduate admission.
If you have the budget, we can place your work in Q1 journals
There is no official data on just how many people are using these companies but in Shenzhen, an employee at one agency said that her team handled about 80 clients at any one time.
“We secure orders virtually every day year-round. During peak summer periods, we take on up to five new clients a day,” said the employee, who would only be identified by her surname Qiu.
Qiu said her agency specialised in one-to-one tutoring to help students research, write papers and publish in top journals.
“We offer one-to-one paid research, which means the main lecturer will handle all your work, including lecture content and essay refinement, to ensure you will gain substantive outcomes from the experience,” she said.
“We require students to submit their own first draft to us. Regardless of whether this draft is good or not, our team will refine it until it meets publication standards. Fees are based on the target journal’s tier and publication difficulty.”
The basic one-to-one service costs around 11,000 yuan and includes 10 hours of tutoring, with a guarantee that the revised paper will be published in a top-cited international journal.
“If you have the budget, we can place your work in Q1 journals,” she added, referring to the top 25 per cent of academic publications.
“In that case, the tutoring price is more than 50,000 yuan per paper for humanities subjects, while STEM fields cost much more.”
The company Wong used also required clients to do the initial draft of the paper but he did not get that far.
He said that after attending just one lecture, he realised that the course content was “shallow and simplistic” and did not touch upon the students’ research topics.
“The lecturer just read out generalised theories from PowerPoint slides. I really wasn’t satisfied with this teaching quality. Given how these lectures are taught and the [minimal] workload involved, you can already tell how subpar the final paper would be,” he said.
Wong withdrew from the three-month programme in the third week and received a partial refund.
“I refuse to waste my time, or allow this paper to become an academic liability in my applications,” he said.
Xiong Bingqi, director of the 21st Century Education Research Institute, a Beijing-based think tank, said the boom in such commercial research firms reflected society’s results-driven thinking.
“Very few undergraduates possess genuine research ability. Their participation stems from the desire to get direct postgraduate admission, rather than authentic passion for academics,” Xiong said.
“Those education agencies cater to this demand by running research as a business, which further distorts its original purpose.”
Xiong said another driver of the industry was excessive parental involvement in university applications.
“Some parents are wealthy enough to fund these purchases for their children, which is irrational and absurd.”
China's job market preps for impact as record graduate wave approaches
While youth unemployment rates have dropped in recent months, a cohort of 12.2 million graduates is almost certain to erase those gains
Despite an easing of China’s youth unemployment rate in June, the country is steeling itself for a challenging job-hunting season as a record number of fresh graduates prepares to enter the labour market.
While this marked the fourth consecutive month that China’s youth unemployment has fallen, it remained over one percentage point higher than the figure recorded at the same time last year, suggesting significant strain on the job market as the graduation season approaches.
