I used to ghostwrite in my late undergrad and grad school years. While I did take a lot of conventional ghost writing jobs - blog content, marketing copy, and even the occasional local news article or op-ed, a majority of my work (and income) was sourced from essay writing for other students, and this was by far the most profitable and easy work. I could easily earn between $100-$150 USD in a day with 2-3 hours of effort. Compared to other typical student jobs, doing the writing gigs was a no-brainer. Less time. More money. Can do it while lightly multitasking (listening to podcasts, etc). For a student, I lived very comfortably. In fact, my first year in a 'real' job, I actually made less money than I did when I was writing college students' essays.

I constantly feel like I should be more ashamed of myself for enabling others to cheat, but I have difficulty mustering much regret about it. There are only a handful of types of people that are willing to pay $10-20/page for some nicely-formatted, double-spaced drivel, and I don't think the fact that they sometimes (or maybe always) cheated makes a difference in the long run.

I'd regularly engage my clients in discussions and look at their online identity to see who exactly I was working for.

The super-majority of customers appeared to be wealthy foreign students that, though they would present a good rough outline of what they wanted in an essay, lacked the English skills to turn the outline into a readable document. These were typically students in engineering or hard science disciplines buying their way out of a 'core curriculum' class with little to no direct relevance to their discipline, and they generally viewed English communication skills as irrelevant to their future plans to return to their home country and practice whatever skill they picked up at a US university.

The next most common 'type' of essay buyer was the business student that clearly was failed by whatever primary education system they were subjected to. Most were obviously from wealthy backgrounds, but a surprising number seemed to be poor and desperate to keep their head above water. This type of client usually had abysmal written communication skills despite being a native English speaker, and often struggled to provide any sort of coherent guidance in terms of what they expected in the essay that would be delivered. I eventually began charging this type of client double what I would charge the latter sort, because their sheer inability to convey what they wanted or needed would in turn make my life difficult. They were also the most likely to complain or demand last-minute edits. Out of this category of client, the people with family wealth and connections have a better-than-average chance of success regardless; the people desperately paying to offload their essays to pass a course will either be forced to improve their own skill-sets and knowledge, or end up sinking to whatever level of work is appropriate for them. I have a hard time believing that selling either sort of student an essay or two radically impacts their life prospects, or the prospects of other students (that might be subject to a grade curve somehow influenced by my work).