Posing this question directly, is plagiarism really that big of an issue amongst student bodies? Some is always to be expected of course, but I'm struck by how much it's brought up by my uni for example - I would've thought in comparison to high school people would be more interested in building their skills to get their money's worth
This... kind of has two answers: Before ChatGPT and After ChatGPT.
Before ChatGPT, there were always one or two per class. I only ever taught/TA'ed for big lecture-hall gen ed courses, and a solid 50% of the students thought it was a pointless or at least unimportant checkbox they had to fill out and wanted to do as little work as possible to get it. But few intentionally plagiarized. Sure, there were some people who turned in essays they downloaded off the internet or got from their fraternity brothers, and they were easy to catch with plagiarism checkers. There was one girl who, memorably, noticed that for weeks no one was checking their weekly writing responses other than to see if they did them, so she just started turning in pure copy-pasted chunks of the assigned readings. These are people who were taking the class because they felt they were required to, who did not want to be here and don't want to do the work because if it's outside their major they feel it's a waste of their time. I think this is a very sad way to view gen ed classes, but it is a very common one.
The more interesting cases were, there were always a handful of students who genuinely didn't know what plagiarism was. Or rather, they knew that downloading an essay off the internet, slapping your name on it, and turning it in as your own was wrong, and they'd never do that... but they genuinely didn't know that copy-pasting lines from the textbook or Wikipedia uncited, or changing a few words to synonyms, counted as plagiarism. They didn't understand why you were supposed to "say things in your own words" if the original source said it better, and they didn't know that just changing a few words around wasn't sufficient. They were taught that plagiarism was wrong, but never why. These are the students who benefit most from the hbomberguy video: because he explains not only what plagiarism is, but why it's wrong, and what you should do instead, in a thorough and accessible way.
Post-ChatGPT, tons of students are using LLMs to write their essays. Tons. It's bleak. There was an assignment where students would write an essay first draft, I would give them feedback, and they would incorporate the feedback into their second draft. Fully half of students very, very obviously plugged my feedback into ChatGPT and had it rewrite their essay for them. It was genuinely crushing. I put in a lot of effort to give every student personalized feedback on how to improve their essay and they slapped it into the slop machine and called it done.
I don't know if they just don't want to do it and don't care, or if they truly think that ChatGPT is better at writing than them and they want to turn in the best essay they can. Probably some of both. And the most frustrating part is I know it, but unless they do something really dumb like cite fake sources (something I have in fact gotten before), I can't prove it to any standard of reasonable proof. So I just have to act like I believe they wrote it. It's bad out there.
Although one unifying theme is:
I would've thought in comparison to high school people would be more interested in building their skills to get their money's worth
There is a significant percentage who are not. They see the degree as a product to be gotten, the grades as a means to get it, and any method of getting those grades is worth doing. Learning and skill development is not what they are here for, Getting The Degree is. That's what they feel they are paying for. Unfortunately, that's what the system incentivizes. It's a whole system of perverse incentives where learning is a fun bonus if you want to engage in it, on the way to Getting The Degree.
Higher education desperately needs an overhaul.
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