buy a university essay

• Skip to main content
• Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

Buying College Essays Is Now Easier Than Ever. But Buyer Beware

Tovia Smith

Concern is growing about a burgeoning online market for essays that students can buy and turn in as their own work. And schools are trying new tools to catch it. Angela Hsieh/NPR hide caption

Concern is growing about a burgeoning online market for essays that students can buy and turn in as their own work. And schools are trying new tools to catch it.

As the recent college admissions scandal is shedding light on how parents are cheating and bribing their children's way into college, schools are also focusing on how some students may be cheating their way through college. Concern is growing about a burgeoning online market that makes it easier than ever for students to buy essays written by others to turn in as their own work. And schools are trying new tools to catch it.

It's not hard to understand the temptation for students. The pressure is enormous, the stakes are high and, for some, writing at a college level is a huge leap.

"We didn't really have a format to follow, so I was kind of lost on what to do," says one college freshman, who struggled recently with an English assignment. One night, when she was feeling particularly overwhelmed, she tweeted her frustration.

"It was like, 'Someone, please help me write my essay!' " she recalls. She ended her tweet with a crying emoji. Within a few minutes, she had a half-dozen offers of help.

"I can write it for you," they tweeted back. "Send us the prompt!"

The student, who asked that her name not be used for fear of repercussions at school, chose one that asked for $10 per page, and she breathed a sigh of relief.

"For me, it was just that the work was piling up," she explains. "As soon as I finish some big assignment, I get assigned more things, more homework for math, more homework for English. Some papers have to be six or 10 pages long. ... And even though I do my best to manage, the deadlines come closer and closer, and it's just ... the pressure."

In the cat-and-mouse game of academic cheating, students these days know that if they plagiarize, they're likely to get caught by computer programs that automatically compare essays against a massive database of other writings. So now, buying an original essay can seem like a good workaround.

"Technically, I don't think it's cheating," the student says. "Because you're paying someone to write an essay, which they don't plagiarize, and they write everything on their own."

Her logic, of course, ignores the question of whether she's plagiarizing. When pressed, she begins to stammer.

"That's just a difficult question to answer," she says. "I don't know how to feel about that. It's kind of like a gray area. It's maybe on the edge, kind of?"

Besides she adds, she probably won't use all of it.

Other students justify essay buying as the only way to keep up. They figure that everyone is doing it one way or another — whether they're purchasing help online or getting it from family or friends.

"Oh yeah, collaboration at its finest," cracks Boston University freshman Grace Saathoff. While she says she would never do it herself, she's not really fazed by others doing it. She agrees with her friends that it has pretty much become socially acceptable.

"I have a friend who writes essays and sells them," says Danielle Delafuente, another Boston University freshman. "And my other friend buys them. He's just like, 'I can't handle it. I have five papers at once. I need her to do two of them, and I'll do the other three.' It's a time management thing."

The war on contract cheating

"It breaks my heart that this is where we're at," sighs Ashley Finley, senior adviser to the president for the Association of American Colleges and Universities. She says campuses are abuzz about how to curb the rise in what they call contract cheating. Obviously, students buying essays is not new, but Finley says that what used to be mostly limited to small-scale side hustles has mushroomed on the internet to become a global industry of so-called essay mills. Hard numbers are difficult to come by, but research suggests that up to 16 percent of students have paid someone to do their work and that the number is rising.

"Definitely, this is really getting more and more serious," Finley says. "It's part of the brave new world for sure."

The essay mills market aggressively online, with slickly produced videos inviting students to "Get instant help with your assignment" and imploring them: "Don't lag behind," "Join the majority" and "Don't worry, be happy."

"They're very crafty," says Tricia Bertram Gallant, director of the Academic Integrity Office at the University of California in San Diego and a board member of the International Center for Academic Integrity.

The companies are equally brazen offline — leafleting on campuses, posting flyers in toilet stalls and flying banners over Florida beaches during spring break. Companies have also been known to bait students with emails that look like they're from official college help centers. And they pay social media influencers to sing the praises of their services, and they post testimonials from people they say are happy customers.

"I hired a service to write my paper and I got a 90 on it!" gloats one. "Save your time, and have extra time to party!" advises another.

"It's very much a seduction," says Bertram Gallant. "So you can maybe see why students could get drawn into the contract cheating world."

YouTube has been cracking down on essay mills; it says it has pulled thousands of videos that violate its policies against promoting dishonest behavior.

But new videos constantly pop up, and their hard sell flies in the face of their small-print warnings that their essays should be used only as a guide, not a final product.

Several essay mills declined or didn't respond to requests to be interviewed by NPR. But one answered questions by email and offered up one of its writers to explain her role in the company, called EduBirdie.

"Yes, just like the little birdie that's there to help you in your education," explains April Short, a former grade school teacher from Australia who's now based in Philadelphia. She has been writing for a year and a half for the company, which bills itself as a "professional essay writing service for students who can't even."

Some students just want some "foundational research" to get started or a little "polish" to finish up, Short says. But the idea that many others may be taking a paper written completely by her and turning it in as their own doesn't keep her up at night.

"These kids are so time poor," she says, and they're "missing out on opportunities of travel and internships because they're studying and writing papers." Relieving students of some of that burden, she figures, allows them to become more "well-rounded."

"I don't necessarily think that being able to create an essay is going to be a defining factor in a very long career, so it's not something that bothers me," says Short. Indeed, she thinks students who hire writers are demonstrating resourcefulness and creativity. "I actually applaud students that look for options to get the job done and get it done well," she says.

"This just shows you the extent of our ability to rationalize all kinds of bad things we do," sighs Dan Ariely, professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University. The rise in contract cheating is especially worrisome, he says, because when it comes to dishonest behavior, more begets more. As he puts it, it's not just about "a few bad apples."

Felicity Huffman And 12 Other Parents To Plead Guilty In College Cheating Scandal

"Instead, what we have is a lot ... of blemished apples, and we take our cues for our behavior from the social world around us," he says. "We know officially what is right and what's wrong. But really what's driving our behavior is what we see others around us doing" or, Ariely adds, what we perceive them to be doing. So even the proliferation of advertising for essays mills can have a pernicious effect, he says, by fueling the perception that "everyone's doing it."

A few nations have recently proposed or passed laws outlawing essay mills, and more than a dozen U.S. states have laws on the books against them. But prosecuting essay mills, which are often based overseas in Pakistan, Kenya and Ukraine, for example, is complicated. And most educators are loath to criminalize students' behavior.

"Yes, they're serious mistakes. They're egregious mistakes," says Cath Ellis, an associate dean and integrity officer at the University of New South Wales, where students were among the hundreds alleged to have bought essays in a massive scandal in Australia in 2014.

"But we're educational institutions," she adds. "We've got to give students the opportunity to learn from these mistakes. That's our responsibility. And that's better in our hands than in the hands of the police and the courts."

Staying one step ahead

In the war on contract cheating, some schools see new technology as their best weapon and their best shot to stay one step ahead of unscrupulous students. The company that makes the Turnitin plagiarism detection software has just upped its game with a new program called Authorship Investigate.

The software first inspects a document's metadata, like when it was created, by whom it was created and how many times it was reopened and re-edited. Turnitin's vice president for product management, Bill Loller, says sometimes it's as simple as looking at the document's name. Essay mills typically name their documents something like "Order Number 123," and students have been known to actually submit it that way. "You would be amazed at how frequently that happens," says Loller.

Using cutting-edge linguistic forensics, the software also evaluates the level of writing and its style.

"Think of it as a writing fingerprint," Loller says. The software looks at hundreds of telltale characteristics of an essay, like whether the author double spaces after a period or writes with Oxford commas or semicolons. It all gets instantly compared against a student's other work, and, Loller says, suspicions can be confirmed — or alleviated — in minutes.

"At the end of the day, you get to a really good determination on whether the student wrote what they submitted or not," he says, "and you get it really quickly."

Coventry University in the U.K. has been testing out a beta version of the software, and Irene Glendinning, the school's academic manager for student experience, agrees that the software has the potential to give schools a leg up on cheating students. After the software is officially adopted, "we'll see a spike in the number of cases we find, and we'll have a very hard few years," she says. "But then the message will get through to students that we've got the tools now to find these things out." Then, Glendinning hopes, students might consider contract cheating to be as risky as plagiarizing.

In the meantime, schools are trying to spread the word that buying essays is risky in other ways as well.

Professor Ariely says that when he posed as a student and ordered papers from several companies, much of it was "gibberish" and about a third of it was actually plagiarized.

Even worse, when he complained to the company and demanded his money back, they resorted to blackmail. Still believing him to be a student, the company threatened to tell his school he was cheating. Others say companies have also attempted to shake down students for more money, threatening to rat them out if they didn't pay up.

The lesson, Ariely says, is "buyer beware."

But ultimately, experts say, many desperate students may not be deterred by the risks — whether from shady businesses or from new technology.

Bertram Gallant, of UC San Diego, says the right way to dissuade students from buying essays is to remind them why it's wrong.

"If we engage in a technological arms race with the students, we won't win," she says. "What are we going to do when Google glasses start to look like regular glasses and a student wears them into an exam? Are we going to tell them they can't wear their glasses because we're afraid they might be sending the exam out to someone else who is sending them back the answers?"

The solution, Bertram Gallant says, has to be about "creating a culture where integrity and ethics matter" and where education is valued more than grades. Only then will students believe that cheating on essays is only cheating themselves.

Ultimate Guide to Writing Your College Essay

Tips for writing an effective college essay.

College admissions essays are an important part of your college application and gives you the chance to show colleges and universities your character and experiences. This guide will give you tips to write an effective college essay.

Want free help with your college essay?

UPchieve connects you with knowledgeable and friendly college advisors—online, 24/7, and completely free. Get 1:1 help brainstorming topics, outlining your essay, revising a draft, or editing grammar.

Writing a strong college admissions essay

Learn about the elements of a solid admissions essay.

Avoiding common admissions essay mistakes

Learn some of the most common mistakes made on college essays

Brainstorming tips for your college essay

Stuck on what to write your college essay about? Here are some exercises to help you get started.

How formal should the tone of your college essay be?

Learn how formal your college essay should be and get tips on how to bring out your natural voice.

Taking your college essay to the next level

Hear an admissions expert discuss the appropriate level of depth necessary in your college essay.

Student Stories

Student Story: Admissions essay about a formative experience

Get the perspective of a current college student on how he approached the admissions essay.

Student Story: Admissions essay about personal identity

Get the perspective of a current college student on how she approached the admissions essay.

Student Story: Admissions essay about community impact

Student story: admissions essay about a past mistake, how to write a college application essay, tips for writing an effective application essay, sample college essay 1 with feedback, sample college essay 2 with feedback.

This content is licensed by Khan Academy and is available for free at www.khanacademy.org.

Advertisement

How to buy purdue 2024 ncaa men's final four tickets, share this article.

For the first time since 1980, the Purdue Boilermakers are going to the Final Four.

No. 1 Purdue won a rollercoaster of an Elite Eight game, defeating No. 2 Tennessee 72-66 . behind 40 points and 16 rebounds from 2024 Wooden Award favorite Zach Edey.

SHOP : Purdue Boilermakers Final Four tickets

Purdue will take on the winner of Sunday evening’s Elite Eight matchup between the Duke Blue Devils and North Carolina State Wolfpack.

Tickets to the Final Four are still available , and at the time of publication are available for as little as $223 .

The Final Four will be played on Saturday, April 6 in Phoenix, Ariz.

Final Four tickets give access to both Purdue’s game and the matchup between No. 1 UConn and No. 4 Alabama.

Weekend passes are also available, giving access to both Final Four games on Saturday and Monday night’s National Championship. Weekend passes are available for as little as $440 .

We occasionally recommend interesting products and services. If you make a purchase by clicking one of the links, we may earn an affiliate fee. FTW operates independently, though, and this doesn’t influence our coverage.

Most Popular

Fans crushed the ncaa after nc state and texas realized the court in portland had incorrectly painted 3-point lines, 2024 nba mock draft 5.0: donovan clingan and the most fascinating prospects during march madness, why angel reese seemingly cursed at the ucla bench after fouling out of lsu's sweet 16 win, the kim mulkey washington post profile finally dropped, and fans had memes after reading it, how many march madness schools have sent both men’s and women’s teams to the final four in the same year, hoops fans were in awe of dj burns' classy moment with security staff after final four berth, caitlin clark gave the perfect answer on angel reese rivalry question ahead of iowa-lsu rematch.

Please enter an email address.

Thanks for signing up.

Please check your email for a confirmation.

Something went wrong.

Custom essay writing service

Tailor-made essays with a quality guarantee

Let your custom essay unlock straightforward academic success

Trusted by 1,5M+ happy customers

24/7 Support

Free originality report

Complete anonymity

Unlimited edits

No hidden fees

Meet our native-speaking custom essay writers

We select top-class writers to work on your essays. Every person on our team is a seasoned expert with 3+ years of experience.

Key reasons why students choose us

Free report on originality.

If you request it, we can attach a report to your order to verify that your paper is plagiarism-free.

Anonymity guaranteed

Your privacy is ensured; our encrypted site lets you safely consult with your personal writer.

Constant 24/7 support

Reach out to our customer support anytime for queries or urgent orders; we're always available.

Ask for as many edits as you wish 30 days after receiving the final paper.

Follow these simple steps to achieve your goals

1. send the task instructions.

Fill out the order form, specify all the details of your task, and attach relevant files if necessary.

2. Choose from our pool of experts

Select a custom writer for your task. View writers' profiles, ratings, and customer feedback to find your perfect fit.

3. Receive your essay

Find your finalized custom essay order in your email inbox. Check the content, request the edits, and release the payment to your pro.

Check out the reviews from your peers

See what other students have to say about our paper quality, privacy policies, and paper originality.

Frequently asked questions

How do i pay for a custom essay, can i monitor my writer's progress, what if i buy custom essay but it doesn't meet my expectations, are your custom essay writing service plagiarism-free, can you write my custom essay and guarantee timely delivery, can a plagiarism detector see that i have used your service, explore our custom essay help, essay pro: who are we.

EssayPro custom essay writing service provides tailored academic help for students. Our team is filled with talented writers who are experts in various areas, ensuring your essay is not only unique but exactly meets your requirements. We're here to help you boost your grades and make your academic life a bit easier.

No matter the time, our support team is always on standby, ready to assist you 24/7. Plus, we take your privacy seriously, so all your information stays completely confidential. Choose EssayPro, and you can concentrate on your other studies, knowing your essay is in capable hands.

Discover the benefits of our service

Our service is founded on a strict customer-oriented philosophy, ensuring your satisfaction is always at the forefront of our efforts. We pride ourselves on offering an affordable service that caters to various needs, whether a simple essay or a complex research paper. Entrust us with your assignment, and we'll give you the invaluable gift of free time.

When you place an order from us, you can be assured that we're equipped to handle orders of any complexity. By employing some of the industry's most knowledgeable and sought-after experts, we adhere to the highest quality standards.

Enjoy your time stress-free secure in the knowledge that genuine writing professionals are managing your work. If you have further questions or need additional assistance, our friendly customer support team is always available and eager to help. Experience the excellence and ease our offers, and make your academic journey smoother.

Why entrust your paper to EssayPro

Students hire writers for a variety of reasons. Professional academic helpers can ease your life and improve your in-school performance without extra hassle.

Learners also often decide to buy essay when balancing their studies and a job. This is a common scenario for many students, which leaves them overworked and stressed out. Besides, juggling work and college makes it nearly impossible to maintain high quality for both. Services like EssayPro can help you achieve more by offloading mundane tasks from your shoulders.

Moreover, many students want to enjoy the luxury of free time. College life is so much more than classes and assignments! Go out with your friends, relax at home, attend that party, and make new connections while our talented helpers craft your papers.

How do I order custom essay?

Get your essay aced in a blink of an eye with our custom essay writing services. Besides top-tier content quality and a professional approach, we offer a seamless ordering process that doesn't require much from you. Place your request for in 3 easy steps:

• Complete the order form. Share as many details about your task as you can. Inform your expert about the paper deadline, topic, level of study, etc. We also recommend attaching instructions from your prof and all corresponding files. The more info you provide, the better the outcome.
• Review the bids from academic helpers. Pick the most competent author to nail your assignment. Look through the writers' profiles, check their credentials, and read customer reviews.
• Find your completed essay in your email inbox. Check out the final work and ask for free-of-charge edits. Release the funds to your writer only when 100% satisfied with their work.

That's it! Academic excellence doesn't have to be complicated.

Explore the endless benefits of our service

Our paper writing service offers you much more than A-worth essays. Our key goal is to help you excel academically without extra effort and stress. That's why we take it upon ourselves to create an academic masterpiece that reflects your strengths. We also ensure that every piece is crafted from scratch and is 100% unique. Our writing pros have perfected their formatting and referencing skills, delivering masterfully shaped academic papers.

But that's not all! With EssayPro, you can always count on wallet-friendly prices and regular promotions. Place your order in advance or request a bunch of services and save a great deal! Moreover, your tight deadlines are our concern now. We never miss a due date and often deliver essays before the deadline. If you have any more questions, feel free to contact our round-the-clock customer support. Simplify your student life with EssayPro today!

Hire accomplished custom writers

Our greatest asset is the team of seasoned professionals that drive our service. Each our writer in our roster is well-educated, holds degrees such as Ph.D. or MA, and comes with a minimum of 3+ years of hands-on experience in the field.

The quality of our work resonates with our customers, and their satisfaction is reflected in the feedback they leave on platforms like Sitejabber, TrustPilot, and ResellerRatings. These testimonials offer an authentic glimpse into our services.

We understand the importance of finding the right fit for your customs writing, and to that end, we've assembled a catalog of proficient experts. This catalog showcases their success rates, past papers, and customer reviews and enables direct communication with any potential writer through our encrypted chat boxes.

Our process is streamlined to be as user-friendly as possible. Provide us with your task requirements and any details you want included, and leave the rest to us.

Who are the writers behind your service?

When you say " write my essay ," you are engaging with some of the industry's most well-versed and sought-after writers through our service. Each of our experts is a native English speaker from the US or Canada, backed by at least 3+ years of writing experience and top-college degrees. You might wonder how we ensure such high qualifications. Our rigorous hiring process includes a combination of tests, interviews, and practical tasks, and only those who prove their writing skills and pass our Quality Control checks are permitted to complete orders.

Wondering how to trust your selected writer about your custom essay? Rest assured that our professionals are assigned to work only on subjects they excel in. You can verify their corresponding specializations through their profiles. So go ahead, place your order, and choose the writer you believe is best suited to fulfill your needs.

Experience the high-quality work that our expertly selected team of professionals delivers with each task!

Why students pick us

Students love our service due to our unmatched quality and the vast array of freebies they can enjoy in the process. When you get a custom essay from us, you also get revisions, formatting, outline, originality report, and much more absolutely for free. Moreover, we don't charge extra for assistance from the most qualified academic authors. Each and every writer on our team is a well-versed wordsmith with at least 3 years of experience. With a large pool of talents from various industries, we are able to satisfy any paper request, delivering tailor-made content that will boost your grades.

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

Guest Essay

There’s No Such Thing as an American Bible

By Esau McCaulley

Contributing Opinion Writer

The presumptive Republican nominee for president of the United States, who weeks ago started selling shoes , is now peddling Bibles. During Holy Week.

What’s special about this Bible? So many things. For example, according to a promotional website, it’s the only Bible endorsed by Donald Trump. It’s also the only one endorsed by the country singer Lee Greenwood. Admittedly, the translation isn’t distinctive — it’s your standard King James Version — but the features are unique. This Bible includes the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, the Pledge of Allegiance and part of the lyrics of Mr. Greenwood’s song “God Bless the USA.” Perhaps most striking, the cover of the Bible does not include a cross or any symbol of the Christian tradition; instead, it is emblazoned with the American flag.

While part of me wants to laugh at the absurdity of it — and marvel at the sheer audacity — I find the messaging unsettling and deeply wrong. This God Bless the USA Bible, as it’s officially named, focuses on God’s blessing of one particular people. That is both its danger and, no doubt for some, its appeal.

Whether this Bible is an example of Christian nationalism I will leave to others. It is at least an example of Christian syncretism, a linking of certain myths about American exceptionalism and the Christian faith. This is the American church’s consistent folly: thinking that we are the protagonists in a story that began long before us and whose main character is in fact the Almighty.

Holy Week is the most sacred portion of the Christian calendar, a time when the church recounts the central events of our faith’s narrative, climaxing in the death and resurrection of Jesus. That story, unlike the parochial God Bless the USA Bible, does not belong to any culture.

Holy Week is celebrated on every continent and in too many languages to number. Some of the immigrants Mr. Trump declared were “ poisoning the blood” of America will probably shout “Christ is risen!” this Easter. Many of them come from the largely Christian regions of Latin America and the Caribbean. They may have entered the country with Bibles in their native tongues nestled securely among their other belongings.

One of the beauties of the Christian faith is that it leaps over the lines dividing countries, leading the faithful to call fellow believers from very different cultures brothers and sisters. Most of the members of this international community consist of the poor living in Africa, Asia and Latin America. There are more Spanish-speaking Christians than English- speaking ones .

If there are central messages that emerge from the variety of services that take place during Holy Week, for many Christians they are the setting aside of power to serve, the supremacy of love, the offer of divine forgiveness and the vulnerability of a crucified God.

This is not the stuff of moneymaking schemes or American presidential campaigns.

It was Pontius Pilate , standing in as the representative of the Roman Empire, who sentenced Jesus to death. The Easter story reminds believers that empires are more than willing to sacrifice the innocent if it allows rulers to stay in power. The church sees Christ’s resurrection as liberating the believer from the power of sin. The story challenges imperial modes of thinking, supplanting the endless pursuit of power with the primacy of love and service.

Easter, using the language of St. Augustine, represents the victory of the City of God over the City of Man. It declares the limits of the moral reasoning of nation-states and has fortified Christians who’ve resisted evil regimes such as fascists in South America, Nazis in Germany, apartheid in South Africa and segregation in the United States.

For any politician to suppose that a nation’s founding documents and a country music song can stand side by side with biblical texts fails at a theological and a moral level. I can’t imagine people in other countries going for anything like it. It is hard to picture a modern “God Bless England” Bible with elements of British common law appended to Christianity’s most sacred texts.

I am glad for the freedoms that we share as Americans. But the idea of a Bible explicitly made for one nation displays a misunderstanding of the story the Bible attempts to tell. The Christian narrative culminates in the creation of the Kingdom (and family) of God, a transnational community united by faith and mutual love.

Roman Catholics , Anglicans and Orthodox Christians, who together claim around 1.5 billion members, describe the Bible as a final authority in matters of faith. Evangelicals, who have overwhelmingly supported Mr. Trump over the course of three election cycles, are known for their focus on Scripture, too. None of these traditions cite or refer to any American political documents in their doctrinal statements — and for good reason.

This Bible may be unique in its form, but the agenda it pursues has recurred throughout history. Christianity is often either co-opted or suppressed; it is rarely given the space to be itself. African American Christians have long struggled to disentangle biblical texts from their misuse in the United States. There is a reason that the abolitionist Frederick Douglass said that between the Christianity of this land (America) and the Christianity of Christ, he recognized the “widest possible difference.”

And while Christianity was used to give theological cover to North American race-based chattel slavery, it was violently attacked in places like El Salvador and Uganda, when leaders including the archbishops Oscar Romero and Janani Luwum spoke out against political corruption.

The work of the church is to remain constantly vigilant to maintain its independence and the credibility of its witness. In the case of this particular Bible, discerning what is happening is not difficult. Christians are being played. Rather than being an appropriate time to debut a patriotic Bible, Easter season is an opportune moment for the church to recover the testimony of the supremacy of the cross over any flag, especially one on the cover of a Bible.

Esau McCaulley ( @esaumccaulley ) is a contributing Opinion writer, the author of “ How Far to the Promised Land: One Black Family’s Story of Hope and Survival in the American South ” and an associate professor of New Testament at Wheaton College.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Instagram , TikTok , WhatsApp , X and Threads .

U-M to buy slice of former Kmart HQ site in Troy for future medical center

The University of Michigan plans to buy a portion of the former site of the old Kmart world headquarters in Troy and build a medical center there for its health care system.

The future Michigan Medicine center would be a sliver of a broader 28-acre development that is envisioned for 3100 West Big Beaver, where the old headquarters stood from 1972 until its demolition last fall.

The U-M Board of Regents voted Thursday morning to approve a tentative $4.4 million deal for 7.3 acres of land at the site. The seller is a joint venture involving the Forbes and Frankel families. It has owned the roughly 40-acre site since 2009.

The Forbes Co., which also owns the nearby Somerset Collection mall, is said to be handling development of the overall site. A company representative declined comment Thursday regarding their grand vision for the location.

The massive and architecturally distinct Kmart headquarters building had been vacant since 2006 and met the wrecking ball last fall .

The university's health system, Michigan Medicine, says it plans to build a "multispecialty" center that would include ambulatory surgical services and some cancer treatments. The specific specialties and services to be offered haven't been determined, officials said, and approvals through the state's Certificate of Need process for new medical facilities are still needed.

Nevertheless, construction is expected to begin next year, with an opening anticipated in 2027.

The Troy medical center would be the first of its kind for Michigan Medicine in Oakland County, officials said. It would be similar to existing Michigan Medicine centers in Brighton and Northville, although the Northville center doesn't offer the ambulatory surgical services that are planned for Troy.

“We are planning development of a facility that focuses on advanced specialty and diagnostic services," Dr. Marschall Runge, CEO of Michigan Medicine and dean of the U-M Medical School, said in a news release. "This is a starting point for a broader and deeper U-M Health presence in southeast Michigan.”

In an interview with reporters Thursday afternoon, Michigan Medicine officials referred all questions on future development plans for the overall site to the Forbes Co., which declined comment.

More: Architecturally unique Kmart HQ in Troy will likely go down as last of its kind

More: Ascension hospitals in Saginaw, Tawas and Standish to become part of MyMichigan Health

Michigan Medicine has lately been on an expansion push to areas of the state far beyond its Ann Arbor base, and health system officials said that by opening a new medical center in Oakland County, they anticipate gaining new patients as well as bringing greater convenience to existing patients who already see Michigan Medicine doctors.

The health system intends to hire new providers and technicians to staff the Troy center, the officials said.

"We recognize that to best service Michigan, we need these types of partnerships, we need to extend our capabilities and meet patients closer to home and not expect everyone comes to Ann Arbor," Dr. Scott Flanders, chief clinical strategic officers for Michigan Medicine, said.

After Kmart moved out, the HQ site had been slated to be redeveloped as "the Pavilions of Troy" with condos, retailers, offices and a hotel, but that proposal unraveled in the Great Recession. In 2009, an ownership group composed of the Forbes and Frankel families bought the roughly 40 acres for $17.5 million.

Forbes Co. founder Sidney Forbes later told Crain's Detroit  that the purchase was a "defensive move" after rival developer Grand-Sakwa Development started courting Somerset tenants for a development.

Michigan Medicine on the march

Michigan Medicine has been expanding its presence throughout the state and last year absorbed Lansing-based Sparrow Health System, a deal that grew Michigan Medicine's statewide marketshare to over 15%.

It also has a clinical affiliation and business partnership with Midland-based MyMichigan Health, which uses U-M's branding and logo. MyMichigan Health announced this week that it plans to acquire  three Ascension Michigan hospitals in Saginaw, Tawas and Standish, a deal that is still subject to antitrust approval.

(A separate proposed deal for Henry Ford Health to gain control over eight other Ascension Michigan and Genesys hospitals is still awaiting approval.)

During Thursday's U-M Board of Regents meeting, two regents who live in Oakland County said they are excited about the health system expanding its footprint there.

“I just want to say as a resident of Oakland County, for a long time we have missed out on having Michigan Medicine in our backyard,” regent Jordan Acker said. “This … will provide incredible access to that market, but also for my neighbors who are looking for that Michigan experience without having to travel outside of the county. This is a welcome, necessary and long-needed addition to Michigan Medicine’s portfolio.”

Regent Denise Ilitch also voiced her approval.

“I’m very excited about the purchase of the real estate," Ilitch said. "I think that the project is really going to be beautiful. But more important, we’re going to be able to offer services in Oakland County. I, too, am a resident there, but being able to spread our wings and provide better quality services in this area — health services — is really a benefit to our citizens.”

Contact JC Reindl: 313-222-6631 or [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @jcreindl