I am not exactly sure if that problem is interconnected, but I think this is related to the general education problem of that you don't know what actually is behind a grade and they are given out inconsistently depending on teachers and institutions despite requiring synchronicity of meaning to be comparable.
In addition, this is just another instance of social indicators getting gamed the moment the actors aren't neutral towards them anymore. This is also why I believe that most attempts to control immigration will inevitably lead to this nonsense.
How much of this is about the general human vigilance against people "putting one over on us", along with the general human tendency to game regulatory systems? I think about this in the context of the controversy over asylum-seekers in the US too. Clearly along with many legitimate asylum seekers in the early 2020s there were also many economic migrants gaming the asylum system. Voters might plausibly have been in favor of offering refuge to the former, but disproportionately angered and concerned by the latter because of the perception that they were "cheating" and thus putting one over on US citizens.
It seems like something similar could have happened with diploma mill "students" in Canada. How would we distinguish this from voter reaction to actual change in the material cost-benefit picture of immigration policies? Maybe this seems like a nitpicky distinction, but I think there is a potential difference here between the actual impact on citizens' lives and the impact on instinctive perceptions of people "cheating" vs "playing by the rules".
That make sense. The "cheating" perception and the material cost-benefit picture are hard to disentangle, but that's partly the point. The actual effects of immigration policies are extremely hard to know precisely. You could construct a model where even diploma mills are net welfare-enhancing in some interesting way. But if the system is clearly operating against its own stated rules and intent, we can't blame voters for opposing it.
The asylum parallel works the same way--the backlash isn't mainly about whether asylum seekers contribute economically, it's about the system's purpose being subverted. That's not irrational, but rather arguably a reasonable demand for institutional integrity.
I am not exactly sure if that problem is interconnected, but I think this is related to the general education problem of that you don't know what actually is behind a grade and they are given out inconsistently depending on teachers and institutions despite requiring synchronicity of meaning to be comparable.
In addition, this is just another instance of social indicators getting gamed the moment the actors aren't neutral towards them anymore. This is also why I believe that most attempts to control immigration will inevitably lead to this nonsense.
How much of this is about the general human vigilance against people "putting one over on us", along with the general human tendency to game regulatory systems? I think about this in the context of the controversy over asylum-seekers in the US too. Clearly along with many legitimate asylum seekers in the early 2020s there were also many economic migrants gaming the asylum system. Voters might plausibly have been in favor of offering refuge to the former, but disproportionately angered and concerned by the latter because of the perception that they were "cheating" and thus putting one over on US citizens.
It seems like something similar could have happened with diploma mill "students" in Canada. How would we distinguish this from voter reaction to actual change in the material cost-benefit picture of immigration policies? Maybe this seems like a nitpicky distinction, but I think there is a potential difference here between the actual impact on citizens' lives and the impact on instinctive perceptions of people "cheating" vs "playing by the rules".
That make sense. The "cheating" perception and the material cost-benefit picture are hard to disentangle, but that's partly the point. The actual effects of immigration policies are extremely hard to know precisely. You could construct a model where even diploma mills are net welfare-enhancing in some interesting way. But if the system is clearly operating against its own stated rules and intent, we can't blame voters for opposing it.
The asylum parallel works the same way--the backlash isn't mainly about whether asylum seekers contribute economically, it's about the system's purpose being subverted. That's not irrational, but rather arguably a reasonable demand for institutional integrity.
Excellent as always.