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The Pay-to-Play Research Industry Selling High Schoolers a Shortcut to College

Paid "research programs," ghostwritten papers, and predatory journals have turned teenage research into a status product. It was never a golden ticket to admissions — and increasingly, admissions officers see straight through it. More importantly, doing research to impress a college is the wrong reason to do research at all. It teaches students to perform curiosity instead of practice it, and it crowds out the students who actually want to learn how the work is done.

Read the ProPublica investigation →