My theory on the academic outsourcing industry is that it will inevitably enter the mainstream, just like various other forms of outsourcing. Put yourself in the shoes of a student. To the left you have professors, to the right you have career and corporate.
Professors / Faculty
When you look at professors ten years ago versus today, the trend is from little/no outsourcing to full-out outsourcing. They send TAs to teach lectures, draft exams, proctor them, and grade them. Perhaps more significantly, the major online textbook publishers are increasingly offering online tool suites complete with prepared quizzes and tests. More often than not, when we execute an online quiz for somebody, the answers are accessible online because the verbatim questions are completely Google-able. Professors are huge outsourcers.
Our industry is only really value-adding to students whose professors fit the lazy profile above. My father is a medical school professor, but he doesn't even bring lecture notes or slides to class, much less a textbook. He has all the chemical compounds and teaching content up in his head and he believes quality teaching only comes through great face-to-face interactions between student and professor, and by careful note-taking on the part of the students. Professors like him pose the greatest challenge for our industry because completing high quality work necessitates deep knowledge of what is discussed in-class. Google-able content becomes extremely restricted.
In short, our industry is able to exist and thrive because professors are lazier than ever, and becoming even lazier.
Career / Corporate
Outsourcing is clearly mainstream in corporate. If I am hired as a marketing manager at Pfizer, my responsibilities include market research, advertising allocation, strategy development, and other stuff. I wouldn't perform any of those tasks on my own. I hire MR vendors like IMS or BCC, I hire advertising agencies to allocate my spend and channels, and I hire top consulting firms like Bain/McKinsey/BCG etc. to develop a strategic marketing plan.
As important, in most corporate settings, the nature of the work is largely disconnected from academic curriculums. This is evident by the fact that (1) fresh graduates are not taken seriously, because in the professional world experience >>>> theoretical knowledge; and even more significantly by (2) whatever company you work for, you are retrained according to that particular organization's SOPs. To build on the earlier example, if I am hired as a marketing manager at Pfizer and then leave to take the same role at Johnson & Johnson, J&J will retrain me. My wife graduated economics then went to work for a major bank. She was trained and presently uses none of the knowledge she graduated with. This is the norm, not the exception, and this pattern effectively renders many academic curriculums dysfunctional at best and moot/redundant/pointless at worst.
Another reason why the industry will become mainstream--
Plagiarism is BS
The only people who care about plagiarism are professors. The principle interest of most professors is conducting research and authoring publications--specifically being first author and taking credit for research--with teaching being viewed as the added "cost" of being affiliated with and receiving research grants and resources from an accredited academic institution. I honestly believe most students do not give a rat's ass about plagiarism. Students just want to pass and graduate, and hope to earn a high enough GPA to land a job that will enable them to pay back their student loans. In short, the notion of "plagiarism" is the construct of elitest professors and because it matters to them in their community's p contest, they push it onto students as well and tell them it should matter to them. Moreover, if the writer does not mind if the student takes credit for their work, then the law will never have any say in the matter. The question of adequate education is settled separately via professional licensing systems. For these reasons, I believe our industry will always continue to exist within the boundaries of civil/criminal law.
There's more to my theory but I'll stop there for now. Interested in hearing your thoughts.
