Why are students cheating so much?

By Editor-in-Chief on June 6, 2025

Leon Valentine | Red Phoenix correspondent | Florida–

Recently, New York Magazine released an article highlighting the epidemic of cheating in universities. Containing multiple anecdotes from both students and professors, the article hits home the idea that ChatGPT and other generative AI have infected all levels of education. The students interviewed unanimously declared that AI made their life easier and the difficulty of class assignments trivial at best. However, instead of examining the reasons of why students feel compelled to cheat and use AI to complete assignments the author goes into a moral panic on how students are losing their rigor and soon to be lacking in their mental faculties. It’s certainly true that by trivializing their work that students will lose their ever declining, critical thinking skills, but instead of focusing on what happens after a student’s education it’d be more beneficial to examine what happens before a student even sits in their lecture hall.

Students, like workers, feel the growing alienation from Capitalist society, and this is the crux of the situation. Students are cheating, not because they are lazy or lack educational rigor, but because education at a fundamental level is not about education. It’s about money, and not in the way you think. Everyone knows education is a business, but what many often fail to consider is that education is also a personal investment on the student’s behalf to appreciate their labor value. Students cheat because they have no real connection to their work and they have no connection to their work because there’s really no reason for them to have one. Think about many of the conversations you hear about education and college.

“What are you going to do with that degree?”

“What type of work are you thinking of doing?”

And of course the infamous:

“Make sure you go to college, so you don’t end up like them!” usually said by a parent pointing at a service industry worker.

At its very core, we treat education as a means to an end, not as a path to enlightenment. And students aren’t wrong to think this. The median college graduate makes just over 50% more than the worker with just a high school level education per year (As of 2022). They also make nearly $650,000 ($450,000 for women) more over their lifetime earnings than their high school educated peers. It’s no surprise then that students want to breeze through college and get as high a grade as possible. If they are able to graduate quicker they are certain to end up saving money, and with a higher GPA they are liable to be more likely to obtain an internship that will catapult them into full employment post-graduation. Students cheat because they have a material incentive to. In our society, workers compete tooth and nail for minimum level jobs just to survive. From this perspective can we even really blame them? Pride and personal satisfaction don’t have calories nor do they provide a roof, you know.

AI has a tremendous power to help innovate in all facets of life, including education. The problem then is not the technology itself, but fault lies in the social relations that it exists under (Although AI does pose serious concerns related to its environmental impact). If we want to reinvigorate students and create well-rounded critical thinkers for future generations we need to abolish the social and economic supremacy of Capital. Only then can education really be about education, and students wouldn’t feel the need to cheat anymore.