When you think of a college or a university, you probably think of its most visible parts: students, faculty, ivy-covered brick buildings, classrooms filled with eager learners, sports, and maybe the dormitories or dining halls. But there is another, shadow university that operates in and around the more visible parts of academia providing the everyday assistance that college students need to get through the rigors of classwork. This includes T.A.s, tutors, writing coaches, remedial instruction, adjuncts, and even essay writing services. If you don’t think essay writing services play a major role in keeping a university functioning, think again.
Why Students Need Essay Writing Help
According to recent statistics the vast majority of students who enter college lack the writing skills to be successful at the college level. Consequently, an overwhelming majority of students are required to complete remedial or introductory college writing courses. Statistics show that as many as 67% of first-year college students need remedial writing help. In the United States, more than 200 colleges and universities have more than half of their students taking remedial courses in math, writing, or both. Almost 600,000 students are currently in remedial courses.
The rates are “so high that there’s no question students are getting out of high school without the skills they need to succeed in college,” researcher Alex Mayer of MRDC, an education and social policy research organization, told The Hechinger Report. One reason for this is that high schools are putting an increasing emphasis on “teaching to the test” due to the rise of standardized testing, meaning that students are getting shortchanged on skills that aren’t measured on standardized multiple-choice tests, especially advanced writing skills. That leaves them ill-prepared when they arrive on campus.
The Cost of Failure
The cost of this failure is estimated at as much as $7 billion per year in terms of wasted tuition, extra course work, adjunct faculty costs, and other problems created by the need for remediation.
Students who don’t receive the help they need to complete their essays are more likely to drop out of school or to fail. Currently, nearly four out of every ten students who start college have not finished their degrees after six years. Most of those students have dropped out or failed out. Essay writing services help to staunch some of the costs and save some students from college failure.
How Essay Services Can Help Students
When students seek out professional online essay help from an academic writing company like SmartWritingService.com, they take back control from the high school educators who failed them and the colleges that don’t provide the support and instruction that they need to succeed. Custom essay writing services are a legitimate way for students to get the urgent help they need to succeed. While essay writing services have had a shady reputation, they have legitimate uses that can give college students a leg up in a difficult situation.
- First, essay writing services help to free students from busywork so they can focus on the things that matter. For example, most students are not majoring in writing, and the skills that they use in writing essays are typically not relevant to their majors or to their future careers. When that happens, the amount of time and effort that they put into the minutiae of academic essay writing can become a major problem, taking time away from the learning they need to do. By offloading some of the burden of the irrelevant parts of essay writing to an outside expert, students can gain back more time for learning, especially when they are faced with competing demands from jobs, work-study, extracurricular activities, family, and their social life.
- Second, essay writing services help to make up for some of the deficiencies that students have because of their high school experiences, leveling the playing field with more privileged students. In a time when students don’t have the money in their tight budgets to pay for extra schooling or private tutors, essay writing services provide an affordable alternative that help students learn the ins and outs of essay writing in a practical way. For example, students who use these services get an expert view on the topic of the essay and can see how someone with an advanced degree such as a master’s or a PhD would research the topic and construct an argument about it. By seeing the practical aspects of turning their specific topic into a finished essay, they can learn by doing and skip the theory of essay writing that can bog down and confuse students.
This is especially true in a time when there are not enough services available for students who need writing help. With more than half of students currently in remedial courses, university writing services are pushed to the brink.
Overwhelmed professors and T.A.s don’t have the time to work one-on-one with students in the depth they need, and college and university writing centers are overworked and unable to keep up with demand. Indeed, some schools are already outsourcing their writing tutoring services to professional online tutoring services, many of which use tutors based in third world countries or themselves undergraduates and not always the strongest writers. Essay writing services, therefore, are only slightly different from these services in that they provide more specific help that is personalized for the student who needs it.
Essay writing services have an undeserved bad reputation because of how they are sometimes misused, but it shouldn’t blind us to the good they do.
