Today's Generation S- for "Stupid"

Did you know that there are dozens of American free-lance writers ghost-writing essays for lazy, wealthy and/or stupid college students. Some of these students are foreign-born whose knowledge of English is limited. Yet, from our foreign aid money or money made surreptitiously by their parents, they arrive in American colleges and university, eager to party and sit in a few classes in order to get a degree, and return to their home-lands ready to prosper, by managing other people to do their work.

The Internet features a lot of "essay" companies which offer to "assist" students in writing their essays. The "wink-wink" notion is that these students pay more than $15 a page to have something that they can use as a draft to create their own original masterpieces. Give me a break! These slobs, frothing at the mouth from a night of binge drinking or over-heated sex, turn in those papers as is, and the professors and TA's are letting them get away with it, having pocketed the tuition dollars and operating, for the most part, diploma mills. Please tell me, Professor So-and-so that a student from Taiwan, struggling for English sentences in your class-room is writing her own essay with perfect grammar and spelling. Convince me, Ms. TA that Prince Salaam from some Arabian potentate, attending an occasional class, can turn in a sparkling book review of Magic Mountain, probably thinking that Thomas Mann is related to that Herbie Mann he hears on his IPod. And, oh yeah, wasn't there a story in a supermarket tabloid about the Mann Act?

There have been stories about other students doing homework for athletes in college, mostly in the South where athletics are the most important part of four-year colleges (except, perhaps, at Duke). In some cases, the fault lies with administrators and athletic departments of what are "wink-wink" institutions of higher learning. Youngsters are admitted who barely have the talent to read, write and remember what they tried to read and write. We are turning out this Generation S- for "Stupid" because for some reason it has been advertised to parents that a college education is a must for their offspring. Not everybody can be creative or master the Classics or turn out the next great American Novel or find some new element or new vaccine to ease the suffering of disease. So, why make them pay to have someone do their college level work? Oh, I get it! Free-lance writers whose agents have told them their screenplays or autobiographies are un-marketable need some income. And some entrepreneurs who always see profit in the stupidity of young people are firmly entrenched in their growing businesses. And if some professor or TA feels that checking an essay on Turnitin.com will solve the plagiarism, or essays will actually be created by those for whom English is a second or third or otherwise impossible language to master, are only fooling themselves and the rest of us who actually worked to achieve whatever we can call our legacy.