> The people who cheat miss out on learning.

They aren't there to learn. They are there to jump through hoops to get a degree that will let them get a job so they can make money and prosper. The learning is entirely secondary.

The cheating will stop when there is no longer any economic incentive to be there in the first place. People with "pure" motives will refuse to cheat on their own, precisely because they want to learn and cheating prevents them from learning.

Watermarking AI output is a treatment for symptoms. The cause is the higher education meme. Somehow, getting a degree just became the default. Can't get a good job without a degree. That meme needs to die, and higher education will never recover its integrity until it does.