To the grandparent: having grown up in Claremont, I can tell you that the reason Harvey Mudd has less problems with alcohol than the other Claremont colleges is almost completely a result of which students it accepts rather than its honor code.
What you say certainly has some truth to it, and I am skeptical this policy would work for the population at large. However, the other colleges (especially Pomona) are also pretty selective in their admissions, and there is a significant overlap in student life between the various colleges. While Mudd's honor code may not work as well with other student populations, I also think that other regulatory systems would not work as well with that student population. For one thing, it's essentially a college of hackers (in the HN sense), so having a stricter or more explicit set of rules would probably result in "creative" ways of following the letter of the law, with less regards to the spirit.
Can you expand on what you mean? I can't imagine that either test scores or economic status is correlated with jack-assery, although I guess it's possible. If I were forming an experiment, in fact, my hypothesis would be that the latter is positively correlated (but I doubt it would pan out).
I do. And my neighbors are hard-working, decent people, despite not having large salaries and getting dirty at work.
I did however, grow up in an affluent neighborhood, and I seem to recall that some people there neither angels nor saints. Maybe about as many as in my current locale.
(Though I think the HMC honor code is fantastic, and I’m sure that it is part of the cause of student self-selection: a certain type of person is likely to apply to a school with such a culture.)
To the grandparent: having grown up in Claremont, I can tell you that the reason Harvey Mudd has less problems with alcohol than the other Claremont colleges is almost completely a result of which students it accepts rather than its honor code.