Illustration: Liu Rui/GT

This year's grueling national college entrance examinations, or gaokao, ended across the country this summer, but a growing number of hopeful candidates among the 9-million-strong talent pool have already chosen to give it up and study overseas. According to a recent report from the Ministry of Education, some 400,000 Chinese students began new courses of study in foreign countries in 2013, 14,300 more than in 2012. This number is expected to reach 500,000 this year.Studying overseas is no longer out of reach for many ordinary young Chinese students. Some 20 years ago, only a very small group of young people had the chance to go abroad, and most of them went out to further their studies after receiving a degree in Chinese colleges.

But now kids can be sent out by their wealthy parents at a very young age.

A lucrative market has emerged in response to the strong demand, breeding "study-abroad agents" to help these kids apply for foreign universities.

According to 2012 statistics from the Chinese Service Center for Scholarly Exchange, 66.8 percent of students chose to consult these agents to file applications, which cultivated an enormous market worth at least 80 billion yuan ($12.8 billion).

However, consultancy is not the only business of these agents. In their one-package service, they not only give suggestions to their clients and monitor the whole process of the application, but also provide ghostwriting essays, personal introductions and recommendation letters, which means many portfolio materials are forged.

A 2010 report by Zinch China, a consultancy that focuses on education exchanges between the US and China, estimated that 90 percent of recommendation letters from Chinese students are fake, and 70 percent of application essays are not written by the applicants themselves.

Earlier this month, an article posted on The Hechinger Report, a non-profit news organization focused on producing in-depth education journalism, re-triggered people's attention on this issue.

According to the piece, the admission officers of the University of Washington at Seattle said that one application essay from a Chinese student sounded like thousands of others sent each year to the university. "As many as one in 10 applications," wrote the article, "may include fraudulent material."

I can still recall quite an unethical experience as a part-time ghostwriter in 2011 for a Beijing-based study-abroad agency. For each essay, 500 words or so, I was paid 200 yuan ($32.2). But the agent earned much more, as they charged the parents a price between 20,000 yuan and 40,000 yuan per student.

It was also a dull, mentally taxing job, because looking at these young applicants' lackluster and boring academic and social experiences - some even dated back to their kindergarten age - I had to polish, refine and even reinvent the images of these young people, in the hope of slipping one past the admission offices.

In 2013, more than 350,000 Chinese overseas students decided to return after graduation, 30 times that of the early 2000s.

Many of these returnees, who were sent out at a young age, still found it hard to integrate into the local community and workforce even with foreign college degrees. However, after they came back, they found themselves also lacking knowledge about their own country, creating quite an unusual dilemma.

Fake applications are becoming pervasive thanks to these unscrupulous agents. But they are only playing the role of accomplice.

The culprits are Chinese parents who don't have a clear understanding of their own kids. They are willing to pay for these agents to get stereotyped and falsified portfolio rather than waiting and evaluating whether their kids are really qualified and ready for overseas study, and respecting their own choices.

Some Chinese parents have lost their mind to some extent, as they are excessively dedicated to ensuring their kids can get the best education, regardless of their own qualifications and willingness. It is the social ethos that drives the shady profits of the study-abroad agency market.

The author is a Global Times reporter. liuzhun@globaltimes.com.cn