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> Can't we do the sensible thing and lift the minimum income high enough so that only those who want to study will go to college and do so without fear of missing out?

In my particular case, this was not an issue.

I don't want to go into detail, but the students were from a foreign country (this is part of why it was going to be a political nightmare for the Dean).

Two of the three could barely speak English (excepting the ringleader). I mention this ONLY because it was a big tipoff when reading their first exams: they all used idiomatic English phrases that were far beyond what they were capable of in casual conversation. They also used nearly identical phrasing when explaining their answers (another big tipoff).

If anything, I blame their university for admitting students who were incapable of succeeding without cheating. The whole escapade left me feeling dirty. The university admits foreign students (because enrollment/$$$). And they have to know many of the TOEFL scores are either unreliable or fraudulent.

And now the root cause makes sense, corruption of money over what these institutions are meant to be for. Money really does taint all around it.

> Wow, these cheaters are such a bad people. Isn't it unfair to those who don't cheat...?

This is not the sentiment I'm getting here. More like "wow, I hope I don't get a cheater for a doctor, and if they go into research they are likely to fake results in studies. This is a unfair to society, their future employers and subjects"

It's not about fairness in the socioeconomic ladder as much as the damage and cost incurred by having an incompetent fraud in a high-impact professional role.

While I agree with your sentiment, these people aren't aiming for "livable wage" but for (from their perspective) "the top".

> Can't we do the sensible thing and lift the minimum income high enough so that only those who want to study will go to college and do so without fear of missing out?

Australia has a kind of free university for all. Australian citizens get an interest free loan of about $5k/year for tuition. You just pay it back by paying a little more tax on your income over $47k/year until it's gone. If you don't earn over $47k/year, you never pay it back, which is fine and expected. It's also easy to get welfare for housing and food as a student, so university is mostly "free". (For various values of free)

Even with all of that, plenty of people still cheat on university exams. I was shocked to learn about it, but there are always people who take that route.

> What the actual fuck is going on here?

Medicine is a large topic. It requires many years of memorization, experience, etc., and then it requires continuing education and constant practice. This makes the costs of medicine very high.

There is an opportunity for technology to help lower costs. The opportunity was identified decades ago, when the first work was done on expert systems for medicine.

The problem is that this means that if we succeed at applying technology to lowering the cost of medicine, it will look a lot like patients self-diagnosing. In rich countries we really don't like that. In poor countries self-diagnostics is common.

We can lower the cost of care by having lower credentialed providers such as physician assistants and nurse practitioners handle the simple cases. Patients in rich countries have already been self diagnosing for years.

I think money on the scale of a lifted minimum income is not the issue here.

These people want to achieve status. Minimum income wouldn't help.

This is what we did in the Netherlands. Anyone could afford to study if they wanted to, and pay equalisation kept the gaps low. Social housing provided good and cheap places to live.

Until neoliberalism hit though. Then everything was about the market and the ideals of low pay gaps were budget cut into oblivion. Now there's huge inequality and students have to take out huge loans like in the US :(