Speaker 1: There's a seedy academic marketplace that's hidden in plain sight. Now that comes no surprise to everyone in academia, but what's surprising to me is where it's happening. Today I'm going to share with you this strange world where high school students are paying thousands of dollars to become peer-reviewed authors. It's crazy. I think this goes deeper than just someone paying to get into a prestigious university. I think it's a massive erosion of the foundations of academia and an increase in the gap between students and wealthy students to get into these prestigious universities. Follow as we talk about all of the issues that this will cause. This article's title tells you everything you need to know. The newest college admissions ploy, paying to make your teen a peer-reviewed author. Now as we look into this we'll see that these peer-reviewed journals and articles are a little bit weird, but this is now what high school students feel like they need to do to give themselves a competitive advantage over those that don't have a peer-reviewed article. At least 20 online research programs for high schoolers have sprung up in the US and abroad in recent years along with a bevy of journals that publish the work. This is a whole system that's been created to extract money from desperate high schoolers trying to get into prestigious universities. This whole system causes me so much anxiety about the future of academia because this is happening from the moment people even consider what university they're going to go into. The programs serve at least 12,000 students a year worldwide. Most families are paying between $2,500 and $10,000 to improve their odds of getting into US universities, except as few as one in every 25 applicants. Now I was like let's go check out these different services to see what they're like. So this is one of them, LWISE Academic Conferences, and they actually say here that they are on a mission to act as a forum where students and scholars from different fields can share and exchange ideas. This is another one, ScholarLaunch. 95% of ScholarLaunch students got into the top 50 colleges and you only have to scratch a little bit below the surface when you realize that there's 300 mentors, there's 1,500 alumni, and they tell you all of this fancy stuff and then you've got all of this. All of these services, Junior Group Research Program, Customized One-on-One Research Program, Our Programs, you've got all of these, Middle School, blah, blah, blah. So if we click on these to have a bit of a look, Customized One-on-One Programs are highly specialized on students' interests. I want to learn more, yeah, tell me about that. Customized One-on-One Research Practicum for Grade 9 and above. Eight one-on-one sessions with faculty advisor, six one-on-one sessions with teaching assistants, three recorded methodology courses. This is about trying to give high school students a competitive edge by saying, look, I've got a peer-reviewed paper, isn't this brilliant? But what about some of the projects that they're actually doing? So here, A Drug's Life and Impact from the Pharmaceutical Lab to the Store, Global Racism and Anti-Racism, Equality in Education, Social Media, Blessing or Curse? And here we can see that it's a relatively short-ish paper. I wouldn't say that this is particularly good, but this is in the journal, the Research Archive of Rising Scholars, and this is a pre-print. We've also got this one. Is Bitcoin a Blessing or a Curse? National Beijing School, and then here we've got what looks like a peer-reviewed article. It lacks any kind of substance and it's relatively short. It's got a few references. I found out that getting published in this peer-reviewed journal is really easy because some of the journals publishes 75% to 80% of its submissions. So it's actually nothing like the peer-reviewed process. You do a short research project, produce a relatively short paper, say that it's peer-reviewed, when in fact it's just a publication racket. That's like, yeah, give us your money and I'll publish your paper. Want to get into a prestigious university? That's easy. Do this. I like this saying, you know, the publication in JSR, which is this one, the Journal of Student Research, says it's pretty simple. I never got any edits or suggested changes from their side. Perfect. If only academia was like that. Here we are. Here's a paper. Just publish it. Easy. Oh, wouldn't our lives be so much simpler and easier? But that is not the peer-reviewed process. They have not been through peer review. This is all a facade and fake and horrible and what other words? That's it. That's all I want to say about it. Here are the issues that I think this poses to academia. The first one is that it undermines academic credibility and integrity. Now, this is saying to people, hey, it's really easy to like write a research project with someone and get it published in a journal that just accepts everything with no actual sort of like real peer review. Another really bad issue with this is it gives an unfair advantage to those who can afford to pay for these services. Check out this. An editor says that he feels uneasy that access to services like this is largely based on wealth. Clearly, we've already got an over-representation of really rich, privileged people in these sort of like prestigious universities. This is only making it much harder for those who are only basing it on hard work, good grades, and all of the extracurricular stuff they do to get into university because they can't afford to pay to get into one of these really sort of like rubbish peer-reviewed student journals. I think academia has to be very careful at the moment in the way it's representing itself to younger students. I think this is only increasing the amount of cynicism towards university systems and academia. Check out this quote. It says here, you're teaching students to be cynical about research and that's the really corrosive part. I can hire someone to do it. I can get it done. We can get it published. What's the big deal? It's teaching people from an early stage that academic papers are just currency, are just a way to sort of like further your own career. And if we end up with all of these students going in that have already got a peer-reviewed paper, it's going to be much harder for them to be convinced that later on in their career, they need to work hard in other ways to actually publish peer-reviewed paper that is worth publishing because it contains actual data, actual insights. And it's not just this weird sort of like box ticking exercise. That's going to completely erode the foundation of academia as we know it. And we're teaching people from the early stages, even before they get into university, that that's what academia is about. Ticking a box, getting peer-reviewed papers only to further your own career. And that brings me on to that last issue where this teaches students that it's not about curiosity. It's not about sort of like thinking about what you want to know about the world, coming up with interesting questions, following your curiosity until it can't go any further. It is teaching them that it is just a box ticking exercise. That education and universities is all about just sort of like enabling you to get to that next stage. We are not creating critical thinkers. We are not creating people that want to know about the world. We're creating people that just know how to manipulate the system, of which academia is only sort of like that next step in their skiving and manipulative sort of like step in their career. Academia has got its own problems with people gaming the system. This is only going to make it worse. Now, it's not surprising that stuff like this is going to happen. We've got students who want to get into highly prestigious universities using whatever competitive advantage they can use by giving universities exactly what they want, which is impressive peer-reviewed publication credentials. However, we do have to stop and think about who can actually solve this, and it comes down to the universities just saying, you know what, this isn't impressive. We know that these peer-reviewed papers are nothing, that they're just a way to convince us that you're special, when in fact, you've just done it through money. That's not saying that they haven't put a little bit of effort into the research and connecting to the right people, but it shouldn't be seen as the differentiating factor between those students that get in and those that don't. In fact, it's up to the universities at this point to say, we do not accept peer-reviewed publications from students because at the end of the day, we know they're going to be rubbish. They're not going to have years of knowledge and experience to be able to produce a paper that's actually worth reading. In fact, I think that we're going to end up seeing this more and more to the point where it becomes such a burden on universities that no one is going to accept them in the future because it's just like, you know what, everyone's now has got a peer-reviewed paper when they're applying to university. So there we have it. That's what's happening right now. High school students are becoming peer-reviewed publication authors. That's crazy to me. It gives people an unrealistic expectation of what academia is. It erodes the foundation of academic credibility and it gives a massive unfair advantage to those that can actually afford to pay for these services, to connect to institutions, universities, PhD students to help them write these peer-reviewed publications. It is only a matter of time before this is expected from people applying to university and then of course, it's all about that next evolution. What will give them a competitive advantage in the future? I don't know, but it's scary to think about how this can get out of control very easily. Let me know in the comments what you think. I'd love to hear it. If you like this video, go check out this one where I talk about the dark side of academia and how universities are potentially setting you up for failure. Go check it out. It's a great watch.