the original contributors; students earn an average of $2 to $3 each time an applicant buys their essay. “It’s basically a passive source of income for them,” O’Connor says.
Reading successful essays can give applicants a sense of the themes, structures, topics, and tones that made for winning applications, O’Connor says. This is especially helpful for students coming from families where no one has previously attended college, he says. “It gives you a measuring stick, something to judge your work by,” he says.
So what’s to stop an applicant from directly ripping off an essay from the database? O’Connor says The Essay Exchange is putting measures in place to prevent plagiarism, by giving admissions offices access to all of the essays in its database, to cross-reference against new applicant essays that come in. The company is also working to get all of the essays in its database submitted to Turnitin.com, an online plagiarism detector.
The Essay Exchange has been working with about $25,000 in initial funding, from Wallace and other individual investors, and is gearing up to raise a bigger seed round in the coming months, O’Connor says. Its big push right now and through the college admissions season of the next few months is making sure applicants are aware of its service, O’Connor says. The company is focusing especially on those 10 prestigious schools because of the large slice of admissions activity they account for—-about 5 percent of the 4 million applications that go out each year.
Ultimately, the team is looking to make the essay-writing process a bit more egalitarian. Private college admission coaches, most of whom have insider information from previous jobs within admissions offices, can charge anywhere from $2,000 to $40,000, O’Connor says. Roughly 58,000 students pay for them annually, adding up to a $150-million-per-year industry.
“These counselors know what works in getting into these top schools,” he says. “Our idea is to take the actual essays at these top schools that are working, and provide that in a way that’s cheap and easy to access.”
