Comment by Aurornis
> the goal of going to college should be just to get your degree
> figure out the cheapest, easiest way to do it, even if it includes cheating.
And this mindset is why cheating has proliferated. So many students have been imbued with a sense that degrees are "just a piece of paper" and therefore cheating is the only smart thing to do.
> Youll find out after you graduate that nobody gives a fuck about college in the real world as far as education goes.
I'm actually finding it's going the other way. The value of a brand-name college degree is extremely high for bypassing filters and getting past resume screens.
Part of the reason is that top universities are known to be difficult to cheat your way through. Not impossible, but it's not easy either.
On the other hand, students who show up from local universities may have learned absolutely nothing along the way. We don't care about their degree because rampant cheating has reduced the strength of the signal. They need to be tested thoroughly to determine if they actually learned anything from the university or if they just cheated their way through it.
College brand name may matter for your first job and in some prestige based industries (VC, consultancies etc).
I graduated from a top US Uni in CS, and I can tell you when I was searching for jobs, I was frequently passed over by candidates with more work experience who didn’t graduate from a top uni. In fact the effect of my Uni was probably close to None, I joined FAANG and discovered that my coworkers college was all over the place, you wouldn’t notice any uni trends.
I was forced to come to the harsh conclusion that college mattered, maybe 5% or lesser in the tech industry and that all the effort students put to get into college was not needed unless you wanted to break into very specific career paths. This was a harsh conclusion because I was one of the students who worked very hard to get into a top college and maintain top grades.