Buying College Admissions: The Latest Method.

A new industry is emerging that extracts fees from wealthy families to enable their teenage children to conduct and publish research that colleges may regard as a credential. At least 20 online research programs for high schoolers have sprung up in the U.S. and abroad in recent years, along with a bevy of journals that publish the work. The programs serve at least 12,000 students a year worldwide, with most families paying between $2,500 and $10,000 to improve their odds of getting into U.S. universities that accept as few as 1 in every 25 applicants.