For years, many high school students have visited graduate housing at Stanford, soliciting newspaper subscriptions for the San Francisco Chronicle or San Jose Mercury News, which they say allows them to receive scholarships that will help pay for college.

The students are typically low-income minorities, many of them claiming to be recent immigrants from European or African countries. They all have one thing in common: they say that they are selling newspaper subscriptions because they are financially strapped and need money for college.

California Newspaper Sales & Marketing, the largest contractor hired by both the Chronicle and Mercury News to sell subscriptions, and a major contractor responsible for the Stanford area, says that they do not look for any particular profile when hiring these students, as long as the students are doing well in school. Most of the students, they say, have a stable family life and a potential future -- as long as they can obtain the money to pay for school.

The students soliciting at Stanford paint a different picture, however. According to several graduate residents, the students often cite a difficult family life as one of the chief reasons they will have so much difficulty paying for college. One high school student claimed he was an orphan. Another said he was a member of a single-parent household.

The sales strategy is clear: the contractors hire these young adults because they will engender sympathy among many, encouraging them to purchase a subscription in order to help the student go to college. Every person we talked to who purchased a subscription said their chief reason for doing so was the sympathy they felt for the student.

The students carry printed material that says that if they sell enough subscriptions, they will receive a $500 scholarship for college. According to these documents, they receive 15 points for each short-term subscription (more for longer ones), and if they obtain 515 points, they will receive a scholarship.

That claim is anything but the truth. In reality, there is no guarantee the money the students earn will go towards a college education. The students do not receive scholarships; they receive money that can be spent on anything -- not just a college education. The students are paid by check on a regular basis, just like any other part-time job. If they are older than 18, they receive the check directly. Otherwise, the check goes to their parents.

The contractors take no responsibility for where the money goes and make no effort to ensure that it truly goes towards a college education. Eric Abrahams, who works for California Newspaper Sales & Marketing, explicitly denied that they tell the students to say that they need money for school.

He said that it is possible the students discovered that such a sales technique is what works, and the idea simply spread, noting, "We do not control what they say out there. Some of these students use anything to make the customers feel sorry for them."

Mr. Abrahams estimates that each student makes $200-300 each week. Graduate students who have been approached by the solicitors, however, did not believe that assertion. Many said that when they asked the students how much money they received for each subscription, the margins were extremely low, and they could not see how a week's worth of work would result in that much money.

In addition, the success rate of selling the subscriptions is about 10% according to Mr. Abrahams, so the students must approach many individuals in order to earn a significant amount of money.

One student who asked to remain anonymous said that he does not buy subscriptions "because these kids are being exploited, and purchasing subscriptions only encourages them to keep coming back."

This belief is common among graduate residents at Stanford, most of who think that the contractors are exploiting the high school students' financial situation for their own financial gain.

Medical student Becky Kim cited the students' aggressiveness as a reason why she will not listen to their sales pitches. Most Stanford students described the high schoolers as being very persistent, saying that when they ask a student to leave, the student often makes desperate verbal pleas for the potential buyer to purchase a subscription.

Many times, as a last resort, the students ask for donations if there is no interest in a subscription. In one case, after a grad student told a solicitor to leave, the solicitor sat on the steps outside of the students residence.

Graduate students are universally annoyed that the students periodically come to their doors multiple times during the year, an activity that has gone on for several years. Just the mention of these solicitors brought immediate negative reactions from nearly every graduate resident interviewed.

Students generally start working around 5 and end around 7 or 7:30 PM on weeknights, and 9 PM on weekends. They can be transported about 25 miles from their home during the week, and 50-100 miles on weekends, provided they have the parents' permission.

California Newspaper Sales & Marketing is just one of many companies doing the same thing, and even the contractors contract out to other individuals who manage the sales crews. All of the various contractors refused to give out the names or numbers of any of the crew managers who are directly responsible for the students, citing privacy concerns and contractual obligations.

California Newspaper Sales & Marketing has ten crew members, each of which generally has 8-10 sales representatives. They employ approximately 60-70 sales representatives. The managers are responsible for transporting the students to and from the locations in which they will sell subscriptions. The company sells between 1200-1500 subscriptions per week.

Signing up for the program means that a Stanford student will receive several weeks of one of the papers on a trial basis. If they do not wish to have the service, they can cancel it and get their money back, but the students will only receive commission if people have had the newspaper for 30 days.

As an experiment, I subscribed to both the San Jose Mercury News and the San Francisco Chronicle. I received the Chronicle within a week and a half but have yet to receive a copy of the Mercury News, nearly three weeks later, though the check has not yet been cashed.

Interestingly, small type on the bottom of a Mercury News receipt says, "Payments made to the Mercury News are solely for newspaper subscriptions and are not to be solicited as college tuition or donations."