Students seeking to attend college for status rather than to learn are more likely to cheat. There is a current story about many Harvard students who may have cheated on a take-home final exam in political science. There is a lot of vitriol in the comments at the Harvard Crimson article on this, but the following comment is interesting:

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2012/8/30/academic-dishonesty-ad-board/#comment-635012657
Former TA and resident tutor at Harvard (5 years). I was very surprised to observe how many students studied for exams at Harvard. Instead of trying to master the material individually, many of them would band together in groups (5, 20, sometimes even larger) and create "study guides" by splitting up the material and each contributing a few pages to a small booklet of notes. They would then focus on memorizing the booklet, sometimes with haphazard results. As a TA for several large courses, I noticed that on final exams students would often simply regurgitate anything remotely related to the topic of the question; many of these "essays" had a canned feel because they came straight from the same guide that their classmates were using. The solution? 1) Admissions: stop looking for activity stars, and start looking for students who are intellectually curious and care about learning; 2) Campus culture: needs to change; there are too many students who focus on clubs and CVs, and who don't care enough about learning to think for themselves -- instead they prefer to take the easy way out, shopping for gut classes over house lists and relying on sloppily prepared guides; 3) Professors: need to stand up to the task of education; inspire students to value deep understanding over shallow cleverness, effort and integrity over quick results. There is a culture of ego at Harvard that engulfs students and teachers. It is part of the game to make things easy for everyone and pump one another up. Not enough professors take a stand against grade inflation, etc., because really putting in the time to teach would take away from research. Not enough students take the responsibility of learning seriously -- the comment from the student at the end of the article is indicative of an expectation to be spoonfed "the right answers."