I do not think cheating in higher education can be explained simply as “students are bad now.” I dropped out of a master’s program myself. It was not an elite universit, just a regional university in Korea, but even there I often felt strange pressures.

From the outside, academia seems to contain many signals that are not always obviously necessary. I do not mean that peer review itself is unnecessary. The problem is that the actual quality of a paper often seems less important than the journal in which it was published. Some journals are treated as legitimate, others as suspicious, and some publication records are recognized while others are treated almost as if they do not exist.

Then a natural question arises.

Do those journals really have verification mechanisms strong enough to justify the trust placed in them?

If a journal functions as a quality assurance institution, then its authority can be justified to some extent. But in many cases, the system seems to rely heavily on individual morality, reviewer goodwill, the conscience of advisors, and the self-restraint of researchers. The system says, “You can trust this because it was published in this journal,” but it often does not seem to pay enough of the verification cost required to support that trust.

This creates a problem. People who gained reputation through those journal signals often react to criticism of the signal system as if it were an attack on scholarship itself. For them, the authority of the journal is not merely a verification mechanism. It is also the basis of their own career and status. So even when the signal becomes polluted, there is a force that defends the existing signal instead of repairing it.

In that structure, cheating naturally gains power.

If the system rewards compressed signals such as publication counts, journal ranking, citation counts, school names, and recommendation letters more strongly than real understanding, honest failure, and slow learning, then people will look for the shortest path to those signals. That is a predictable result.

What happens next is not a fairer meritocracy. Instead, we get more verification, more references, more networks, and more demands for prior proof. When a shared credential collapses, the market does not become more open. It becomes more closed. People who already have reputations, elite schools, or strong networks survive, while new entrants are asked to prove more and more.

So I do not want to see cheating in higher education only as a matter of individual student morality. Of course individuals have responsibility. But if the system rewards signal acquisition more than honest learning, and if the institutions issuing those signals do not take enough responsibility for verification, cheating will continue to grow.

To me, as a programmer, expecting honesty in a structure that does not reward honesty looks like failed design.

In that sense, I also think we should strongly criticize recent behavior where people attach words like “open” to their projects and sell the trust of open source in order to promote their startups. But if I think about it from another angle, it also feels like a desperate final move to win inside the game of our society.

In our society, morality is assigned far too little value.

I spent decades foolishly believing people didn’t cheat because I grew up around a bunch of Christians. Game theory in action