JOANNE JACOBS: SATs are out. Published ‘research’ is in, but it’s pay to play.

Test scores are out. Everyone’s got an A average. The “community service” trip to Mexico and the start-your-own-charity gambit are ho-hum.

Ambitious parents are paying to get a published “research” project on their teenagers’ college applications, report Daniel Golden and Kunal Purohit for ProPublica and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

High-priced college counselors link high schoolers to services that provide online mentors to guide the work and sites to publish it.

“A new industry is extracting fees from well-heeled families to enable their teenage children to conduct and publish research that colleges may regard as a credential,” they write. “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.”

Weird how the SATs were abandoned in the name of fairness, but it’s the rich benefitting.