They don’t give the money back when you’re expelled. They made their dime off the idiots.

Unfortunately the underperforming cheating frat bro at the back of the auditorium will use his connections to land a C-level job making about 10x as much as his former classmates.

This is true, and I feel like the people who complain about cheating are complaining about it because they feel like “the grade hasn’t been earned”, or what have you. Realistically, the problem here is that the students are robbing themselves of the opportunity to learn, ideally, rather than that they’ve stolen accolades from more promising students. The solution to that problem is a different approach that will get them to learn better.

Of course, college being what it is, you’re probably not learning as much as you otherwise would, based on this structure which is oriented to be more of a zero-sum whittling down, so you can have a more limited group that you can then offer certifications to. The students aren’t incentivized to learn (which, you know, should they be, or should they just want to learn because learning is cool? who knows.), and their knowledge, beyond a basic level, isn’t even really necessary in the workforce. The dynamic is probably going to remain the same after graduation, where the high-income cheater frat bro gets a high paying job, and the put upon dork who thought hard work would get them somewhere eventually has to basically cover everything for them, or risk getting punted to the curb. STEM guys suffer this delusion that they inhabit a uniquely meritocratic position in the workforce, in the economy, but this is not true. Everywhere is littered with its people who succeed on merit, and succeed on raw unadulterated bullshit, it’s the same everywhere.

You cannot correct these flaws by doubling down on perceived meritocracy and “objective” standards. The bias, the positive group and the negative group, are an intrinsic part of these systems. So to say, it’s a feature, not a bug.