That’s a question that gets answered here. He also includes his rationale for doing so at the end of the article; “They are being cheated by the schools that take tuition and give nothing in exchange.”
I am not sure how the students are being cheated by schools that ask them to write papers. And I am not sure how he can say the school is cheating them. I think he may be cheating them, but I don’t see any evidence that the school is cheating them. He certainly doesn’t supply any. I hope his argument papers he writes for $600 are better than this.
But it is interesting, especially what he says about his clients.
In broad strokes, there are three types of term paper clients. DUMB CLIENTS predominate. They should not be in college. They must buy model papers simply because they do not understand what a term paper is, much less anything going on in their assignments. I don’t believe that most of them even handed the papers in as their own, as it would have been obvious that they didn’t write them. Frequently I was asked to underline the thesis statement because locating it otherwise would have been too difficult. But that sort of thing was just average for the bottom of the barrel student-client. To really understand how low the standards are these days, we must lift up the barrel and see what squirms beneath. One time, I got an e-mail from the broker with some last-minute instructions for a term paper — “I told her that it is up to the writer whether or not he includes this because it was sent to me at the last minute. So if you can take a look at this, that is fine, if not I understand.” The last-minute addition was to produce a section called “BODY OF PAPER” (capitals sic). I was also asked to underline this section so that the client could identify it. Of course, I underlined everything but the first and last paragraphs of the three-page paper.
…More than once the phone rang at midnight and the broker had an assignment. Six pages by 6 a.m. — the kid needs three hours to rewrite and hand in the paper by 9 or he won’t graduate. “Cool,” I’d say. “A hundred bucks a page.” I’d get it, too, and when I didn’t get it, I slept well anyway. Even DUMB CLIENTS could figure out that they’d be better off spending $600 on the model paper instead of $2,500 to repeat a course.
He goes into how hard others find it to do after this section ends. It is enlightening reading.
If I don’t find a full-time position, maybe I could do this to pay for my son’s college? (Er, maybe not. But wouldn’t it be fascinating to be handed my own writing on an assignment.)