Ghost nonprofits and the manufacturing of virtue

High school students are increasingly founding nonprofits.

And it’s not because teenagers have suddenly become more altruistic.

It’s because they’ve identified a loophole in the college admissions game.

The numbers tell a revealing story. 

According to The Harvard Crimson, 70.3% of Harvard’s Class of 2027 participated in community service as a high school extracurricular activity. 

Yet only 3% of Harvard graduates go on to work in nonprofits or public service. 

This stark difference between high school community service and actual career choices reveals an uncomfortable truth which is not limited to just Harvard. 

For students, community service is less about serving the community and more about serving their college applications.

And one way to highlight your community service and leadership credentials is to start a non-profit or what is actually a “ghost nonprofit.” 

Like ghost kitchens that exist only on delivery apps, these nonprofits exist primarily on college applications. 

They follow a predictable pattern: 

1. A student (with parental support) identifies a virtuous-sounding hot button cause
2. They create a non-profit and website
3. They manufacture some vague and beautifully unverifiable metrics of impact
4. The get local press coverage to launder the effort in a veil of credibility
5. They get into elite university 
6. The nonprofit then goes dormant shortly after college acceptance letters arrive.

It’s community service without all the hard work. All gain, no pain.

It works so well because students (& parents) have agreed to an implicit mutual non-aggression treaty with universities.

Universities don’t care to identify and reject the obvious fakery and the manipulation of ghost nonprofits because it allows them to highlight the virtuousness & civic mindedness of their student body.

They both win.

The pattern has become so common that college consultants, many with relationships at universities, now openly advertise services to manufacture these projects. Consider this real example: 

One consulting firm offers an “incubator program” that promises to help students “create impactful projects” in just two months. 

The first month is dedicated to “ideation & conception” — finding the right angle to position yourself. 

The second month focuses on “establishing & promoting” — creating a website, drafting an essay about your impact, and building a LinkedIn profile to showcase your achievement.

Let that timeline sink in: two months to conceive and launch an allegedly impactful social venture.

Real community organizations take years to create meaningful change. But this program promises to help you build something college-application-worthy in less time than it takes to complete a semester of high school chemistry.

Even more telling is the language used to market these services.

The program promises to help students “find the best angle to position yourself” — not to create actual social impact. It’s focused on crafting “impressive essays” and personal branding rather than doing anything meaningful. This isn’t about changing the world; it’s about packaging a student up for consumption by admissions offices.

The consulting firm even pairs students with “writing specialists with strong backgrounds in storytelling” — because that’s what this is really about: telling a compelling fictional story. It’s not about community; it’s about content. 

This practice is more pernicious than typical college admissions gaming. 

When a student exaggerates their position on the soccer team, they’re just lying about themselves. Yes – I’m drawing distinctions between degrees of lying but let’s be honest, that is what college admissions have become about.

Ghost nonprofits are a worse type of lie because they exploit society’s real problems as mere personal marketing opportunities. Climate change becomes not a crisis to solve, but a backdrop for college application essays. Educational inequality becomes not an injustice to address, but a convenient narrative device.

William Deresiewicz captured this phenomenon in “Excellent Sheep,” describing how elite education has become an exercise in “credentialing” rather than learning. When interviewed by The Atlantic, he noted how students “engage in asset production” rather than genuine exploration. 

The ghost nonprofit is the perfect example: a carefully manufactured asset designed to signal virtues that colleges claim to value. This is just another tactic to solve the college admission algorithm to get to the next level.

The gap between high school community service and post-graduate career choices exposes the fundamental dishonesty of this system. 

If 70% of students were genuinely passionate about community service out of high school, wouldn’t we see more than 3% pursuing it after college graduation? 

This isn’t about students discovering different interests in college; it’s about them dropping the pretense once it’s no longer needed for advancement. 

The community service requirement has become like SAT prep: something to get through on the way to admission, not a genuine commitment to social change.

These lessons don’t end with college admission. The student who creates a ghost nonprofit to get into an elite college becomes the professional who creates vanity ESG initiatives to appeal to shareholders or the fintech founder who repackages predatory lending as “financial inclusion.”

We’re training a generation of leaders in the art of virtuous fakery. It is all about packaging something empty or even harmful to look like something valuable.

Some might argue this is just another form of resume padding, no different from joining clubs you don’t care about. But ghost nonprofits represent a quantum leap in sophistication. They’re not just padding a resume, they’re creating entire fictional organizations. They’re not just playing the game, they’re inventing new ways to game the system.

What’s the solution? Some universities like MIT and Stanford are making tepid attempts at reform, asking students to distinguish between “independent projects” and registered nonprofits. 

But this is like trying to stop a flood with a paper towel. 

The problem isn’t just about better verification – it’s about a fundamentally broken system.

Perhaps it’s time for a radical reimagining of how we educate and evaluate young people. 

What if new institutions emerged that explicitly rejected the manufactured virtue signaling that elite universities reward?

Imagine a high school that focused on real vs manufactured problem solving or a college that banned student-founded nonprofits from applications entirely. Or one that required five years of verified involvement in any community organization mentioned in an application. Or most radically, what if a new tier of educational institutions emerged that selected students based on demonstrated failure and recovery rather than curated success?

The real solution might not come from reforming existing institutions at all. Elite universities and the parents desperately pushing their children toward them are too invested in the current system to change it. Real change will require building entirely new institutions that value authentic mess over manufactured perfection, genuine struggle over crafted success stories, and actual impact over impressive narratives.

The rise of ghost nonprofits isn’t just a college admissions problem. 

It’s a preview of how our future leaders are learning to approach social problems: not as challenges to be solved, but as opportunities to be exploited for personal gain while doing the least amount of work. In teaching our children to manufacture virtue, we are manufacturing something far worse.

If you read this far, some related essays you’ll also like:

1. Degrees of deception: How America’s universities became debt factories
2. Bread, circuses and education
3. The School of Entrepreneuring
4. From myth to measurement: Rethinking US News & World Report College Rankings
5. The perverse incentives driving America’s government schools
6. The endless ladder
7. Students are solving the wrong problems
8. Your kids grades are bullshit
9. Harvard: The Birkin Bag of Education