Dealing with tight deadlines during school and work is the thought that crosses every student mind during a writing assignment: “I wish I could pay someone to write this for me.”

High school, college and graduate school students have been doing just that. Instead of paying a website to hand over a pre-written essay, some students across the nation turned to Ed Dante, a writer from the East Coast, who makes a comfortable living writing essays for students, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education. He says that he has been writing essays for several years on subjects ranging from simple literary essays to Ph.D. dissertations on psychology. 

For Dante, people desperately asking for essays to be written means a roof over his head, but for future generations, it means workers without a real knowledge of what they’re doing.

Perhaps this sort of cheating has gone on for decades and instructors just haven’t noticed. Or maybe they do know that their students are getting additional help outside of school, but don’t know what to do.

As time progresses, more and more dishonest students are bound to graduate, taking up room in the workplace for people who actually earned their way up with an honest work ethic.

“The nation will carry more graduate student graduates with masters’ degrees that are [falsified]. Since a majority of his clients are English as a second language learners, we’ll see more diverse [people like] doctors who did not really ‘graduate,'” said animal biology major Victor Chern.

Think of it this way; the people who could be taking care of your children could have breezed their way through graduate school by having someone like Dante write their thesis. With this sort of cheating, the future generation of workers will be those who don’t deserve it.

According to Don McCabe, a professor at Rutgers University, students feel compelled to cheat because of college’s implicit nature of competitiveness, making students more inclined to go to great lengths to get good grades. This results in students devising clever ways to cheat (such as writing on desks before a test or re-labeling water bottles) or paying someone to do the work for them. 

The only winner in this situation is Dante. Dante is making roughly $66,000 a year by writing scholarly essays for students, according to the Chronicle’s article. He lives off of the money that students pay him to write. Meanwhile, the students are at a complete loss when it comes to demonstrating what they learned.

With all the recent budget cuts hitting schools all over California, my old high school is feeling the worst of it. According to my former government teacher, her job was saved because she had a master’s degree. These degrees become so valuable during crunch times that they determines if someone’s family is going to eat a decent meal in a couple of weeks or if they’ll be able to live in their house anymore. 

The students who receive help from people like Dante will affect everyone. The students who chose to hire essay writers are only hurting themselves.

“I just think it’s very dishonest. His clients are just lazy bums who are just cheating their way through life,” said Chern.

Unless colleges can find a way to reduce the stress on students, this sort of cheating may persist. What De Anza College can do to help students is to ensure students that when transferring, extra curricular activities are weighted just as much as their grades, according to the website College Confidential. For now, students will have to be given the benefit of the doubt with the assignments they turn in.