As someone who attended an elite school in the post-covid era, here was my experience:
There is relatively little stigma against cheating. Maybe in smaller seminars and classes with higher collaboration there is some, but much less so in large STEM lectures. Many of the incentives in classes where exams were online led to arms races and widespread cheating (without exaggeration, over 80% of the class). For instance, a certain math class I knew of had all grades based on remote and often asynchronous tests. Many people would cheat/collaborate and ace them, leading to the professor increasing difficulty (as scores were very high). This led to more cheating and so on. It got to the point where the problem sets had such difficult problems in this intro class that only a handful of people (who had taken advanced course work in high school) in the entire 100+ person seminar were distributing proofs for everyone else. Really not great dynamics all around and it's worth noting that my school does not have a reputation for being ones with an especially competitive and cutthroat culture.
That's a very interesting call out, the connection between gaming academics and (gaming) finance.
They both do have very concrete point systems with a parallel set of less-measured but very real externalities, don't they?
This brings me to a bit of a related story.
A family member of mine who attended Princeton and was an undergraduate Residential Advisor (RA) in the dorms responsible for care of freshmen recalled hearing a presentation in the early 2000s to parents of students from an academic dean or faculty member. The dean boasted to the parents how great their kids were, describing how each year in the last decade they kept adding more work to the students and the students kept rising to the challenge. My family member RA, very aware of the resulting stress the students were under was horrified. This family member thrived at Princeton and loved it, but is quite wary of trying to put their own children on a track to get there or go there.
This event correlates with the increasing fraction of students at Princeton going into finance which began in the early 1990s and which peaked in 2006 with 46% of students at Princeton going into Finance. I had not considered a correlation between student psychological stress and psychology of "gaming"/cheating and the psychological going into finance until your comment.
At that time, there was some sense that perhaps many Princetonians went into Finance because they had to pay of the huge loans from the price tag. After a couple decades on working on financial aid improvements, now that Princeton (tuition) is free for people with family incomes under $250k/year and has been for a while, and still large numbers (admittedly not quite as large) are still going into finance, I'm not sure some of the psychological factors around taboo topics like gaming/cheating and/or more prosaic related factors like reducing cheating while properly sizing the expected workload for the non-cheating population have been explored.
Intentional negligence? In many parts any reasonable looking into future should have made it clear things were unsustainable. Both on loan origination where rates would end up unsustainable for borrowers but also the derivative side with unsustainable liabilities. Screams of being intentional and negligent at same time, but it did make money.
In the past there was more of the expectation that if you were caught in a major scandal your political career would be over. In that sense there has definitely been a decline.
There is no peer pressure not to cheat?
Students aren't considered sketchy or jerky for cheating?
Being seen cheating has no adverse affect on their ability to date, to join group projects, to join student startups, etc.?