Inside the lives of people writing essays for US students

Essay-writing services have been around for a long time, but the maturation of the interwebs has allowed for increasingly customized operations. Schools and teachers are now well-equipped with plagiarism-busting tech that can spot a multiply-reused paper, so kids go the personalized route -- paying extra to have someone (usually abroad, in a lower-income country) write an essay just for them.

This New York Times piece dives into the lives of Kenyans who write essays for students in the US, the UK and Australia. Me, I found the work ethic and intellectual curiosity of these essay-writers pretty impressive, and considerably superior to the lazy doofuses here in the US who are hiring them.

If I ran a university, I'd instantly boot any kid caught buying a paper, then offer a full scholarship to the industrious writer who actually composed it.

Consider the case of Mary Mbugua, a Kenyan university student who starts writing papers after her other jobs collapsed. This is cheating, but do you have a choice? We have to make money," she says. "We have to make a living.

After a month of training, Ms. Mbugua began producing essays about everything from whether humans should colonize space (it is not worth the struggle, she wrote) to euthanasia (it amounts to taking the place of God, she wrote). During her best month, she earned $320, more money than she had ever made in her life. The New York Times is identifying Ms. Mbugua by only part of her name because she feared that the attention would prevent her from getting future work.