Everyone is cheating their way through college

I wonder whether the market for a college education is going to crash. Will there be employers who stop caring about the credential because it’s become so cheapened?

Speaking for the US:

I don't think it's been a legit credential for many industries for most of my life. Outside of STEM and Legal, the opportunity cost of college is pretty awful. The insane costs mixed with degrees taking longer and longer, and having almost no practical education or hands on, has made it fundamentally worthless EXCEPT that it's used as an almost classism style divide so employers can assume you're capable of handling things rather than have to do anything remotely reasonable to actually test for it.

What blows my mind is that education is the WORST about it, where having a masters, or multiple masters, leads to a joke of a raise that then winds up being around what new hires make 5 years later.

The whole thing has become a scam hiding in the skin of "well you're not some anti education scum are you!?". Higher learning is important, but we should absolutely be focused on getting public schooling up to snuff first (it is disgraceful how bad our public system is) and the idea that in order for an employer to consider you for a job you first must spend thousands of dollars and years of your life on unrelated material has to go.

I would not be surprised if the coming generation, especially with so many ways to self teach now, is the one to just say "fuck this" from both the employee and employer side. Ironically one of the main issues preventing that already is the awkward ground practical tests/shadowing/etc are in with weeding out potential candidates, as you can quickly run afoul of a zillion different laws and get sued into the dirt for it.

Because pen and paper exams do not cover the full extent of the skills college classes are expected cover. Synthesizing a broad spectrum of information and distilling that into a long, but coherent essay is an important skill that is largely orthogonal to the 1 hour closed book blue book essays.

And I’d argue the former is much more representative of the actual work you’d do in either an office or academia. Your boss is never going to tell you to write them a report by hand, without using any external information.

It’s something you can have in conjunction with long form essay assignments, but you can’t replace the latter with the former.

Probably just unwilling to make a massively unpopular decision, both with students (who don't want to write those papers by hand) and professors (who don't want to read the handwriting of a generation that largely isn't used to operating that way).

I had one professor in college that was all about handwritten essays, we did finals and midterms that way and ended up with massive hand cramps by the end; she was considered to be a hardass even by the standards of late-00s academia. Nowadays I imagine you'd have something closer to outright rebellion from the students, and milquetoast compromise from the administration leavened with nods to accessibility and their image as a modern institution.

I can see it working at small scales but so much of modern academic infrastructure is set up to operate digitally that it would be rough at any larger scale.

The other issue on top of what others mentioned is that those tests cut into class time. That's a whole period where the teacher can't teach, so increasing the number of exams would require serious restructuring of their curriculums to squeeze all their content in. And heaven forbid it's on a Monday (so at least one bank holiday each semester with no classes, at least in the US) and/or a class gets canceled one day for whatever reason.

Probably better to have more work done under proctored exams.

I'm curious: was there a similar reaction from academia when search engines became available?

More in response to the widespread internet adoption as a whole, but if there was a particular target it was Wikipedia. These days it seems to be considered a good source of information, if imperfect, but for a long time teachers hated it loudly.

If cheating is automatic, I don't think there is enough motivation in the world to convince studens to do it for real. The whole idea of homework is inherently adversarial. Doing homework is more similar to a fight than a conversation. Very few do it because they want to.

The closest thing I can think of that doesn't get brought up a ton, is how schools reacted when the internet became a thing and people were -- against internet sources vs. physical media.

Oh how the tables have turned lol.

In a way it's not like "the internet won," it's more that the teachers had to realize the internet was just a different conduit to access information physical or not, and their job would be to teach us to judge the veracity of a source, which is a skill relevant forever until we are dead regardless of technological advances or destruction.

I think it was sort of fair for my early teachers(1999 onwards) to have requirements like, bibliographies that included only 1-2 internet sources, required books, and required primary sources. What I don't think was fair and was punitive, is that the teachers would dock points for FORMATTING a bibliography(I'm talking down to the difference between two spaces after a period vs one). I still feel this way about pedantic shit about citation formatting. But that's probably because I have ADHD and was undiagnosed and un-medicated, so all those details seemed excruciatingly boring to me and irrelevant, yet they impacted grades.

In a weirdly existential and broad way, I feel education and the human condition is always about finding things, and each technological advancement changes how we do that, and it's very disruptive and hard to deal with. As our world knowledge increases, and our expectations of how much or what information one holds in their mind, increases, we try to adapt to keep pace with that.

I think we could avoid some of the arms race of knowledge retention and regurgitation if we lowered our expectations and stopped requiring more and more and more of each generation.

There's a reason we are having memory problems, and I think this is part of it, we just expect people to know too much information at any given time--from those unrealistic expectations, people will find a way to meet them if they need to for whatever reasons (job, degree, etc.) . I don't blame people for becoming "searchers" or as the article put it, "a human assistant to an artificial-intelligence engine" How many millennials, or IT people, joke about, "I'm not good at my job, I'm just good at looking things up" ? It is a skill unto itself, I think we are denying that many jobs are exactly that skill: Problem solving-- which at its heart often involves looking things up(whether it's in your mind or on the internet or in a library).

What we are worried about, is that people will lose the ability to discern if what they have looked up is relevant/"correct"(applying the knowledge is a different conversation, and highly dependent on what you are trying to accomplish), and furthermore that the people interpreting your answer will also not know if it's correct.

You cannot replace learning to critically think. You cannot replace learning to learn. But boy howdy, are we sure trying to do so.

Option C: Lose 80% of your tuition fees.