Education as a Financial Transaction: Contract Employment and Contract Cheating

Abstract

Over the last decade, high-profile cases of academic misconduct have surfaced across Canada (Eaton, 2020a). I argue that it is systemic issues that contribute to their ubiquity: knowledge is seen as a commodity, transcripts and credentials as products, and students as consumers. As provincial governments in Ontario and Alberta introduce funding models tied to graduate earnings and employ- ment (Anderson, 2020; Weingarten et al., 2019), education becomes a financial transaction and academic integrity is threatened. Credentials hold more value than the process of learning, and when students pay for credentials, it is more palatable to pay for grades. This is exacerbated by a supply and demand for academically dishonest practices. File sharing websites that facilitate cheating are ubiquitous; coursehero.com alone is worth over one billion dollars (Schubarth, 2020). Targeted advertisements for essay mills abound. Meanwhile, academia increasingly relies on the labour of sessionals (Shaker & Pasma, 2018), who tend to underestimate the scope of misconduct (Hudd et al., 2009) and are less likely to report infractions (Blau et al., 2018). Furthermore, those with graduate degrees are increasing (Wall et al., 2018) while stable academic jobs are fewer (Kezar, 2013). Academics faced with precarious employment often supplement income in what Kezar et al. (2019) refer to as the “gig academy”. They are well-positioned to meet the demand for ghost-written papers (Sivasubramaniam et al., 2016). Although many institutions have responded with well-articulated policies and procedures, when entrenched in a system that incentivises and facilitates dishonest practices, they are not lasting solutions to chronic problems. Keywords Academic integrity · Neoliberalism · Contract cheating · Contract employment · Credentialism