[topspin]

IOW, if they fail to tolerate fraud they'll have a smaller pool of candidates because unethical people won't be interested.

This is the sort of thing that's only a problem when your own prerogatives are misguided. Must academe be merely another institution that must pursue growth at all costs? If so then is the pedestal it presumes to occupy legitimate?

[yabadabadoes]

I think they have very few candidates because of the ethical issues, for example nearly no one in the US wants to complete an upper degree because they don't want to be exploited.

To put it differently, poor ethics is possibly a necessity to outcompete other institutions in what should be a net zero game. Instead the game is negative, we view academia overall as worse than n years ago because of the progressively lower ethics, higher administration costs and staff to compete for the same grants, etc.