My life in college was getting better. I was paying even less attention to my own studies and genuinely immersing myself in the work of others. My junior year marked a turning point. Rutgers was finally delivering on its promise as an academic institution. It had put me in touch with the kinds of people who could help me further my career.
My fellow scholars, my college mates, my traveling company along this road of enlightenment toward the Lyceum in Athens, the great library of Alexandria, and all the temples of Buddha.
Speaking of, here was my new client now, Sid.
“Sorry I’m late, bro. I was taking a shit.”
“No worries. I’ve done that.”
“So you’re, like, a paper writer?”
“At your service.”
“Sweet. I really need this. I mean, I don’t need it like I couldn’t do this shit myself. I could. But I’m not going to waste my time on this class.”
Sid was talking about Expository Writing, the basic composition course that most Rutgers freshmen are required to take. It rivals Barney the purple dinosaur as an intellectual challenge and an instrument for teaching.
Sid was in crew. He was short but stocky. His head was almost perfectly square, and he had a crispy gel-helmet that told me right away he was from north of exit 10 on the New Jersey Turnpike. More than likely Long Island.
Sid was a particular breed, one that would fund my future profession.
Sid was, in a greasy nutshell, Generation Y’s worst-case scenario.
Sid was an examplar of a very specific segment of Generation Y, an archetype that would become a constant presence in my life. Surely, in his generation as in all others before it, there are honest, ambitious, intelligent, and compassionate individuals. And in every generation before his, there have been Sids. But the opportunities, pressures, and challenges distinct to his generation have made it easier and more desirable for Sids to take the easy way out.
A Sid has no conscience. He has been coddled, prep schooled, propped up, and promised the world. He has been told that he is special. He has been assured that he is capable. He has been protected from any evidence that he might not be up to the challenges ahead of him. He should stink of self-doubt, but he is buoyed by his own sense of entitlement and the promise of lavish excess in his personal and professional life.
And the Sids aren’t the only ones. According to a 2010 report by the Pew Research Center, “unlike the Silent Generation, Boomers and Gen X… Gen Y is the only generational cohort that doesn’t cite ‘work ethic’ as a defining characteristic.”1 The Pew report notes that a majority of Generation Y respondents cited technology and pop culture as having greater importance in their lives. To put this another way, a statistically significant number of Millennials are more interested in tracking down a Dick in the Box ringtone than in solving the pickle of global climate change.
Not that this inherently makes Sid, or any of his contemporaries, a cheater. But it does mean that we are a legion of avid consumers. Today, more than was true for previous generations, formative experiences for the population of mostly white, middle-class and wealthy Americans who can afford to go to college and graduate school have increasingly come to center on social networking status and celebrity voyeurism. This is the retailer’s most perfect fantasy come true: a demographic organism more consumer than human. Its rites of passage are virtual. Its accomplishments are tweeted. It no longer loiters in front of the convenience store. It loiters on Facebook. It needs to hang out in a place where it can talk about itself, where it can be validated, where it can be assured that somebody gives a shit. It expects schools to be that way too.
And if that means yet more consumption, so be it. New clothes to model on Facebook, new devices from which to tweet, new e-books for school. Sid was a consumer plain and simple. How far one like Sid might go to buy his way through life is generally a matter of resource and motive.
Sid was flush with resource and guided by the twin motives of deficiency and ambition.
I was introduced to Sid through my friend Bree.
I first met Bree at an interregional Jewish youth group event when I was sixteen and she fourteen. She was sitting with her sister on a bench between the bathrooms, a pretty little hippie chick with an indefinable exotic quality, a tulip-petal face, and the narrow eyes of her Russian great-great-grandparents.
Bree has situs inversus, a condition in which, relative to the average individual, all of one’s vital organs are on the opposite side of one’s body. The condition affects one in ten thousand, and its most significant medical ramifications for Bree are that she carries a special card to notify paramedics and pledges allegiance using her left hand. She also bats and throws lefty.
From almost the minute we met, we were inseparable, entrusted, and codependent, even romantic, but never actually involved. Our allegedly platonic friendship took on a type of physical intimacy that is only really acceptable in high school.
I went to Rutgers, and she followed two years later. There we remained close friends, part of the same weekend binge-drinking scene. She made mention of my services at a party one night, and this guy Sid was all over it.
I met Sid that first time in the lounge of his dorm, surrounded by his floor mates. He explained to me that even though he was perfectly capable, extremely intelligent, and generally a straight-A student as far as he could recall, he was above the degrading tasks that comprised Rutgers’s Expository Writing course.
“So, I don’t want you to think I’m stupid, dude.”
“No, man, I don’t think you’re stupid,” I lied.
“I just don’t have the time for this crap. With my crew schedule and my poli-sci courses and everything, I’m not trying to worry ’bout Expos.”
“Yeah, I agree. It’s nonsense. I’d never do it if I wasn’t getting paid to.” I was fortunate enough to have tested out of this course in the summer before freshman year.
“Besides, it’s not like it matters. I just need to do well enough to get outta here. I need to be going to a much better college before I start applying to law schools. I can do way better than this place… no offense.”
“Hey, no, man. None taken. I’ve been to Chuck E. Cheese’s that were more educational than this.”
“Yeah, for real. Wait, really?”
“Forget it. Let’s just get to the thing.”
“K. I just wanted you to know why I wanted your help. I’m not stupid.”
“Don’t worry, man. I don’t judge”… out loud.
Sid sent me home with some cash, some nugget, a textbook, and his in-class writing sample. We were supposed to take this sample and turn it into a passing paper. I got home, smoked his weed, and started reading over his work. Poor Sid. He really didn’t know how far off the mark he was. Nobody had ever told him.
Sid’s in-class writing assignment read like the really long name of a Chinese takeout restaurant. It was a jumble of words slapped together uncomfortably, standing next to one another with an air of remoteness, like strangers in an elevator.
Punctuation dotted the landscape of his work almost randomly, as though he had written the paper first and then gone back through it indiscriminately inserting dots and dashes. For all I know, he was a supergenius who had strung Morse code throughout his paper in order to subliminally impact the teaching assistant’s grading process. Unfortunately for Sid, the TA had missed it entirely. His in-class writing assignment had received a No Pass, the mark indicating that a student needed improvement. Invariably, a large percentage of students received a No Pass on the first assignment or two in Expository Writing.
This was done so that students could be shown to demonstrate improvement and ultimately pass the writing requisite even when no improvements had been demonstrated at all. Starting at zero, most students would pass and some would not. Grading was arbitrary, and classes were instructed by TAs.
Sid felt that his No Pass grade was among history’s greatest injustices. For although Sid lacked many things, confidence was not one of them. He thought the world of himself. He felt an incurable self-worth that could not possibly have been instilled in him by a teacher. It had probably taken a lifetime of little reaffirmations, of barely passable efforts reimagined as successes, of material and abstract gifts—all the tuition, dorm swag, and name-brand threads a kid could want. And you can be damn sure, whether they knew it or not, Sid’s parents were paying for his papers.
Starting with Rich Kid Sid and extending through a line of customers that could wrap four hundred times around the trendiest, douchiest, most popped-collar club in all of Hoboken, I have come to know a portion of this generation that, I’m very sorry to say, suggests that Jersey Shore is the most realistic program on television.
My customers are rooted to the common ground of school attendance in the millennial era. As I have reflected on the thousands of commissioned, completed, and archived assignments in my personal library, I am inclined to argue that at least a portion of the college-educated future leaders of this generation will be undone by their narcissism.
Many of my clients believe that with little to no effort on their part, the world will be delivered to them on a platter. Of course, these assumptions are predicated on the idea that America will continue to produce more opportunities for the children of each succeeding generation. What distinguishes Generation Y on the whole, as opposed to that which distinguishes its least admirable subsets, is the reality that this generational cohort will experience fewer opportunities and a lesser standard of living than its parents.
A 2010 article in Bloomberg Businessweek reports that “Gen Y is in a tougher financial position than previous generations. The average salary for 25- to 34-year-olds, for instance, fell 19 percent over the last 30 years, after adjusting for inflation, to $35,100… That’s if they can get jobs: Unemployment among 19- to 24-year-oldsstands at 15.3 percent vs. the overall rate of 9.5 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.”2
Combine these realities with salary expectations driven not just by the desire to own a luxury sedan with inbuilt ass warmers but also by the incredible expense of higher education, and you start to gain an understanding of why this generation isn’t faring well in a tough economy. America’s businesses are hitting the skids, and this is not a temporary recession. This is a leveling out. This is the great promise of globalization in all its glory. This is the backlash for a culture of utter selfishness, for a way of life that is ecologically unsustainable, and for a mode of consumption so voracious that we must make war on foreign nations to support it.
And we’re counting on guys like Sid to lead us from this mess. I was meeting Sid in between classes at the Student Center to get details for his second assignment.
“Hey. Thanks again for doing this, bro. I really need this.”
“No sweat, man. Business is business.”
“Yeah, but I appreciate it. I mean, this shit’s so unfair. I don’t see why I should even have to take this class. I’m going to work in my dad’s firm either way.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah, dude. Maybe we can get you a job, like, writing legal-type shit for the firm.”
“Yeah, that sounds really great, man.”
I knew exactly who Sid was through and through. He was a sign of the times. My higher education was happening in simultaneity with the Bush administration, with the War on Terror, with the proliferation of reality TV, and with the collapse of corporate America; on the cusp of a spike in oil prices, just before Hurricane Katrina, at the onset of baseball’s steroid scandal, and in anticipation of the meteoric rise of pricks like Mark Zuckerberg and the precipitous fall of pricks like Ken Lay. We put Donald Trump and Paris Hilton on television to be the first impression we make on the alien races many galaxies away who might stumble upon our satellite transmissions.
Ah, the hideous faces of the fabulously wealthy in the last era of American privilege.
George W. Bush always reminded me of one of my customers, the kind who paid for their assignment and handed it in without bothering to read it. CEOs, chairmen of the board, and presidents of the United States pay others to do their research and writing. Then they stand up there and say stuff like “I’ve always believed… America… freedom…” and some crap about family values.
We know they aren’t writing this stuff. We know they haven’t done the research. We know they probably don’t mean it and possibly don’t even understand it. But these people are preordained to sit in the corner office with potted plants, big windows, and an incredible view while a staff of nerdly underlings scampers about gathering clever factoids and synthesizing comprehensive business reports. Schools are highly feudal. Legacies, mentorships, and cost-prohibitive hierarchies of learning denote that many people with considerably less ability than you and I are destined for a better life. I mean, sure, they may feel terrible on the inside (they also may not), but school is not a problem for them. It’s just another corporation.
And it’s a corporation that wants them to succeed in order to justify its own enormity. We promise that No Child will be Left Behind, so we nudge them through the shallow waters of public school education until they find themselves in the deep end of the pool, their lives of comfortable indulgence tied to them like ballasts of concrete.
We are raised to believe that we can be whatever we want to be, we can have whatever we want to have, we can do whatever we set our wallets to. Of course, we are also raised to compete. As Marx notes about a capitalist society, in order for one to have, another must have not. The grading curve is an excellent demonstration of this principle. You can’t get a good grade unless you’re better at something than your classmates. So there is a basic, obvious flaw in the idea that everyone is entitled to a good grade if they work for it. My customers are people whose work ethic (and often intellectual tools) should make them have-nots, but whose aristocratic means convince them otherwise. Nobody bluntly confronted these people with their own limitations or found a way to encourage them to overcome these limitations.
That’s a real shame, because the challenges before this generation will be truly humbling. A generation that insists on updating its online status every time one of its members takes a dump doesn’t know the meaning of the word “humble.” So it lives in denial, expecting that it can always spend the dollars, make the purchases, and be awarded the customer service to succeed in life.
Later on in my career as a paper writer, I would come to know intimately this sense of entitlement, which came spewing out of the occasional disgruntled client.
Here, an unhappy customer asks for a revision of an assignment I’ve completed.
The paper is not Master’s level, is poorly written, does not follow APA format and does not include all the necessary criteria that I submitted… Sentence structure is awkward and reads as if written by someone whose first language is not English… APA format is not followed, see sources cited within the paper… The structure of the information is disjointed and difficult to read…
It goes on for a while, actually. She really takes the time to write a well-thought-out, rationally organized, and essentially accurate essay about how my essay sucked. All of a sudden, she was this brilliant writing critic. And her response to my work revealed her to possess the traits of another of Generation Y’s great archetypes: the pragmatist.
The values, the ethics, the feeling of satisfaction that one is supposed to have in a job well done? These exist. But they are simply factors in a decision that every student makes. They are not everything, they are not encompassing, and for many students, they are in the minority, grouped with other reasons not to cheat, such as the fear of getting caught and the lost opportunity for personal enlightenment. In the majority are the pressures to get good grades; the need to hide one’s deficiencies; the importance of receiving a degree; the necessity of justifying the considerable expense of one’s education; the need to compete for a job in a difficult market; the desire for the attainment of status; the aim of achieving personal freedom; the perception that ethics are secondary to success; the pressure placed upon one by family and friends; excessively heavy workloads; sheer laziness; and a greater interest in sports/drinking/ recreational drugs/promiscuous sex/Magic: The Gathering/fill-in-the-blank than in one’s studies. Naturally, these are not all of the elements of the equation, but this is the nature of the decision that all students make when they determine how they will approach their studies, if at all.
Sid was at least somewhat pragmatic, which is why he needed me. He would not see his transfer to a better school sidetracked by a basic compositional writing course. Rutgers is on the Raritan River, a primary source of drinking water for the region and a historically popular dumping ground for toxic and industrial waste. I imagine that rowing on it is a harrowing experience. Sid needed this transfer. Expository writing, and school in general, would not stand in the way of his future.
He was destined for a more reputable school. He was destined for a higher professional post. He was destined to row on a river more water than feces.
I had already written three papers for him, and, of course, he was totally hooked. I think Sid was probably giving his TA a lot of credit in assuming that he was actually reading the assignments, but I wasn’t about to blow it with a repeat customer.
“I’ve been getting pretty good grades, bro. Keep up the good work.”
“Don’t mention it, buddy. I’m happy to help.”
“Yeah, so, how much would you charge for a little tutoring, then?”
“Like, what kind?”
“Well, I have to do an in-class writing test at the end of the semester, and it’s supposed to show my progress.”
“Have you been making any progress with the in-class stuff?”
“No. My peer-review partner is a fucking bitch.”
“Hmmm.”
Sid pulled a wrinkled sheet of loose-leaf from his folder and handed it to me. It had been savaged by the red ink of disapproval.
“Here! Look!” He thrust it into my hands and smashed a particularly dense cluster of red markings with the tip of his index finger. “Now just what the hell is wrong with this sentence? What does she mean, ‘Fix phrasing’?”
I read the sentence over a few times. I had no idea what it meant. No idea. At all.
This guy was beyond my help.
But I did my best to help him anyway. I continued to write his papers, but I also trained him for his in-class final. I charged him for both. I taught him the standard formatting for an expository essay. I broke it down in simple terms. I told him how to write an introduction by funneling down from a general statement on his subject to a specific thesis argument. I told him to use the thesis to outline three pieces of evidence from the text to support his argument. I explained that he should use these three pieces of evidence as the basis for the three supporting paragraphs. I told him to use a quote from the text in each paragraph and showed him how to cite the source text. I explained that the conclusion should be a restatement of the main idea and an explanation of how the argument was either confirmed or refuted by the supporting paragraphs.
He said, “Nobody ever explained it like that to me before.”
I doubted that it would really matter, though. He’d gotten this far without ever learning how to write. It was all a means to an end, anyway. That end is different for each student, but it is rarely the accumulation of knowledge for its own sake.
So suggests a recent cheating scandal making headlines in Sid’s own backyard. In September 2011, Great Neck North High School graduate Sam Eshaghoff was arrested on charges of falsifying his identity in order to take the SAT college entrance boards on behalf of paying customers from his affluent Long Island region. Also arrested were a number of his customers. Since then, according to an article in the New York Times, “the Nassau County district attorney’s office has broadened its inquiry into suspected cheating on college admissions exams to at least 35 students in five schools, including students believed to have paid for a stand-in to take the ACT, a standardized test that is growing in popularity in the Northeast, as well as the more common SAT.”3
The scandal, which at the time of this writing was still under investigation, demonstrates both students’ sense of the importance of performance in college entrance exams and the kind of emphasis that they place upon it. First, to the sense of importance, it is evident that students who were willing to invest various large sums of money and risk personal and professional ruin felt that they were under significant pressure to succeed. Second, as to the kind of emphasis, the students perceived that a score that might make the difference between a poorly funded state school and a vaunted private university was easily worth the investment of several thousand dollars.
According to a 2011 news report, Eshaghoff’s prices started at fifteen hundred dollars and went up from there. The report also notes that “on an exam whose perfect score is 2400, he delivered the goods for his customers. ‘Some of the scores,’ Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice said at a newsconference, ‘were 2220, 2180, 2170.’ “4 Most of the students accused of paying for Eshaghoff’s services defied the odds of their poor classroom performances during high school and went on to prestigious colleges. And according to an article produced by Reuters, the highest reported payment accepted by Eshaghoff was a sum of thirty-six hundred dollars.5
That the widening inquiry on this subject envelops a region filled with wealthy, high-performing student demographics demonstrates the infiltration of certain consumerist principles into the process of college entrance. And because higher performance on college entrance exams does carry significant and potentially lifelong implications for one’s earning potential, both the investment made and the risk taken by the offenders ensnared by this inquiry—as well as by those countless others who have most assuredly exploited without ever being caught the vulnerabilities of a system too highly staked on standardized testing—can be defended, if not as ethical, at least as rational and pragmatic.
For many people of the Millennial generation, there is a rational pragmatism to cheating that did not exist for previous generations. Certainly the accessibility created by the Web strengthens the argument in favor of cheating. But quite frankly, there are a good handful of arguments in favor of cheating that speak to the logic of this generation’s experience. Its experience suggests to many of its members not only that they are entitled to certain outcomes but also that this entitlement makes pragmatic and arguably necessary certain behaviors that traditional ethics tell us are wrong and evil.
Sid never for a second questioned the value of my services. And I suspect there was no reason he should have. The last time I saw him was at a party the week after our tutoring session.
“Yo, bro! Come have a drink with me. You are awesome!”
“Hey man, I take it your in-class final went well?”
“Oh, fuck that shit. I already got my transfer, man. Found out the day before. Shit, I don’t even know what I wrote. Hah!”
Suddenly, I knew the gratification that Sid’s teachers must feel.
So Sid went off to NYU the next year, and probably, thereafter, to a reputable law school and a job in a corner office with potted plants, big windows, and an incredible view. I stayed at Rutgers, where the view could be described as gritty at best. But at least I was getting my career off the ground.
Pragmatism abounded at Rutgers. By my senior year, I had developed a pretty streamlined system, including a set of rules that I stated to all of my clients at the outset. I was to be paid in total up front. The assignment would be delivered by the requested due date and according to the specifications made by the client. Cost would be determined per page and based on how long I had to complete the assignment. If the client received the work and was not satisfied that the specifications had been met, I would be willing to grant an edit. However, once the work was handed in to a professor, all bets were off. I could not personally endorse the act of plagiarism and therefore would note that I did not recommend handing in the custom-written “study guide” for a grade. Thus, I did not guarantee grades. No refunds would ever be issued on the basis of a grade.
I began receiving phone calls from strangers who had heard of my service. I received the calls with total professionalism. I posed a standard line of questions to each individual. How long is the paper? When is it due? What is the subject matter? Are any specific source texts required? Can you provide said texts? Based on these answers, I would quote a price, and we would set a meeting time and location for the exchange of materials.
During one such phone call, which occurred in the moments before the start of my Basic Acting elective, I leaned on the edge of the stage recording the details of a new assignment. When I hung up the phone, a pretty blonde girl from the class approached me. How exciting. What could this lovely lady want?
“Do you write papers?”
Oh. Of course.
“Sure. What do you need?”
“No, actually, I don’t need a paper.”
Oh? Sweet.
“No. I wanted to tell you, my boyfriend…”
D’oh!
“… my boyfriend works for a company online that writes papers for students. He makes, like, thousands of dollars a month from it.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. You should e-mail him. There’s a lot of money in this.”
Indeed. It was the fall of 2001 when I entered into the nerdly realm of the academic underground. By the approach of my graduation in the spring of 2002, I had long since dispensed with any illusions about doing my own work. I showed up for and passed tests. That was all. I was far too busy doing other people’s work. Perhaps my wealthier classmates had the luxury to care about their grades. I cared about getting by with the only marketable skill that I had. We’re a generation of pragmatic opportunists, and I would be damned if I was going to give away the only thing I had for free.