[pm90]

I don’t think that’s a good idea.

The analogy with financial debt is misleading: people go bankrupt even if they don’t do anything “wrong”, things don’t pan out, or disasters hit. For people that do commit financial crimes, they are prosecuted and face criminal punishment and often lose their ability to continue to be involved in finance.

Academia doesn’t have that kind of strict laws, likely because academic fraud doesn’t affect the general population and is limited in the damage it can do, or hasn’t received similar attention as financial fraud. So making it even more tempting to commit academic fraud isn’t something I would recommend.

The really straightforward solution here seems to be to make these institutions recognize the professors (even the prestigious ones) are human and can commit fraud, and thus to create ways for students to give feedback on such kinds of frauds to the institution, based on which the institution must take action.

[yowlingcat]

> For people that do commit financial crimes, they are prosecuted and face criminal punishment and often lose their ability to continue to be involved in finance.

Wealthy white-collar criminals often only face minor fines and are able to keep operating. The industry perception of people who get caught (who are known to still be only a small percentage of those who commit them) is almost universally "they were stupid enough to get caught."

I wonder whether this is yet another tendril of the student loan debt bubble and the privatization of a public good (education) contributing to deep, structural rot in American society. Most of the quality academic talent gets picked off into the industry, where there are real opportunity costs for mis-execution, and a much more healthy and liquid market for labor supply and demand. Does that mean that maybe the only plausible end-state for academia is a market for lemons?

[pm90]

The low rate of prosecution doesn’t mean that the laws are useless. It has coerced the financial industry into behaving in more pro-public ways than it would have without them. In this case it would likely ensure that academic frauds are not engaged in lightly.

I don’t think Research fraud specifically has much connection to student loan debts. Most PhD students are fully funded by their programs. Most of them are international students anyway and would likely not have access to the sweetest US based loans.