CHGG - Chegg, Inc.

Chegg, Inc.
Services | Education & Training Services | USA

Chegg, Inc. operates student-first connected learning platform that help students transition from high school to college to career. The company's products and services help students to study for college admission exams, find the right college to accomplish their goals, get better grades and test scores while in school, and find internships that allow them to gain skills to help them enter the workforce after college. It offers print textbook and eTextbook library for rent and sale; and provides eTextbooks, supplemental materials, Chegg Study service, tutoring service, writing tools, textbook buyback, test preparation service, internships, and college admissions and scholarship services, as well as enrollment marketing and brand advertising services. The company has a strategic alliance with Ingram Content Group Inc. Chegg, Inc. was founded in 2005 and is headquartered in Santa Clara, California.

 

Let's see what happens at $15 here.

 

About a month ago, Citron came out bearish on CHGG:
"$CHGG is the poster child for institutionalized academic cheating. tgt- $25 Cannot be disputed, cheating now matters $CHGG activities illegal in 17 states. If Chegg turns over the customer list, the stock could be a 0."

The "cheating now matters" phrase refers to the admissions scandal that caught a couple of TV stars and others paying somebody to take the SAT/ACT for their kids.
Now there's another story out involving Chinese students...wondering if this will start getting people's eyes on to businesses like Chegg.

https://www.lamag.com/citythinkblog/ucla-cheating/
A Chinese Cheating Ring at UCLA Reveals an Industry Devoted to Helping International Students Scam Grades
On paper, Liu Cai was a model student. After moving to the United States from Beijing, he majored in biology at UCLA and volunteered at the Boys & Girls Club. A former teacher, Jose Echeverria, remembers him as “an excellent student” and a “great person” who was “easy to get along with.” Cai graduated in 2017 and landed a job at a health care technology company in Santa Monica. He appeared to be doing everything right.

So it came as a surprise when, on a Tuesday morning in March, federal authorities arrested him on suspicion of facilitating an international cheating ring. According to prosecutors, Cai, along with four current and former UCLA students and another student at Cal State Fullerton, helped at least 40 Chinese nationals obtain student visas by fraudulently taking the TOEFL, an English proficiency exam, on their behalf. Cai’s ringers would show up to testing sites with fake Chinese passports bearing their own photos but with the names of the clients. Where Cai slipped—and where investigators caught up to him—was charging 39 test registration payments to his credit card.

Any other day the UCLA bust might have made national headlines, but the news got swamped by a bigger, sexier college cheating scandal: Operation Varsity Blues. (The UCLA investigation was dubbed “Operation TOEFL Recall.”) While the UCLA case is less shocking—bribes in thousands of dollars instead of millions; Chinese high schoolers instead of Full House cast members—it represents an equally notable underbelly of American college admissions. If Varsity Blues is about the American ruling class perpetuating its privilege, the UCLA scandal reveals the extreme pressures and perverse incentives facing international students, many of them far less privileged and desperate to not screw up their shot.

... *snip snip* ...

Cheating can self-perpetuate if unchecked. Chen tells the story of a student who faked his TOEFL score to get into Purdue University. Once there, he paid someone to attend classes for him. His (employee’s) grades were good enough that he got into Columbia University for grad school, but then, struggling, he hired someone to take his classes there, too. Hoping to land a job at Goldman Sachs, he sought Chen’s help. “I think his English was at a high school level,” Chen says. All told, the beleaguered Chinese student spent nearly $1.2 million on not going to school.