> "What does that say about our universities?"

"You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink."

It says barely anything about the universities and everything about the student. If a student just wants to just have a perfunctory gargle at the fountain of knowledge instead of drinking as deeply as they can, that's on them.

Well, I'm not impartial... I kind of have a chip on my shoulder against these phonies, but if you want me to speculate: they are faking their way through university the same way they fake their way through everything else in their lives: Through things like charm, good looks, Ivy League mannerisms, confidence, a firm handshake, a beautiful smile, that certain way of talking like a salesman. During Character Creation, they put all their skill points into "charisma" and just use that to sail through situations the rest of us have to work through. I think we all encounter these people all the time during our careers, and it's infuriating that what they are doing is reliable and works.

I wouldn't blame the universities.

Almost everyone embellishes their resume. Some do it to an extreme. The first stage should be weeding these people out, and any hiring manager learns this lesson very quickly.

Story: I learned this as a hiring manager early on. I was the resume screener, first contact and then last contact. Everyone in between was my team and other adjacent teams. I failed to ask the right questions in a phone screen and when we brought this guy on-site he failed very bad. Even worse, he broke down begging for for another problem he could solve.

It was bad for everyone and we were a very accommodating group that gives many tries. We weren't looking for perfect answers to one question.