Additionally, tuition aid isn’t given directly to school: It goes to the student, who pays the school.
It was always a huge relief to a student if they managed to get a scholarship in cash.
I had enough surplus to pay for a good APC UPS system as well as a 2018 Lenovo Thinkpad notebook. These were invaluable for my education, but they served me for years afterwards, personally as well as for employment.
Maybe this would still allow some fraud, but much, much less profitable.
Same here. Creating some expensive and complex system that fights “fraud” that consists of people taking on lifetime debt is dumb. Make the services share the pain for bad underwriting and the problem goes away instantly.
It's legit to have extra funds to pay for education related expenses.
"Pugh said she’d normally drop three to five from her roster who don’t start the course or make contact with her at the start of the semester. But during the current spring semester, Pugh said that number more than doubled when she had to cut 11 students"
I don't know. If I were a criminal I'd look for something that pays out more if I'm going to expose myself.
I had a high school friend use student loans to buy a car and rent a shithole apartment at 19. He’s probably still paying for that Toyota Camry now.
Surely this can't be completely anomalous? Certainly it's happened before where someone enrolls, receives financial aid, and then for any number of reason stops attending school? What happens then?
Or was that always a loss and now it's just easy to automate that scenario maliciously?
Here's where the system is defective. The loan's balance should go directly to the college's bank account, as a tuition payment.
Suddenly, there'd be no incentive to cheat the system, while actual students who need help paying for tuition would have their tuition paid.
Doesn't financial aid go to the school, not the student?
Federal grants such as Pell are dispursed to the university which then sends any excess to the student.
Loans, which comes in a variety of forms, are dispursed to the student and then the student pays the university.
This can vary depending on the grant, loan servicer, etc.
I really think this problem is being overblown and I am concerned politicians, voters, faculty, and students, will be negatively impacted by this kind of click bait journalism.
This article sucks.
> These “ghost students” are artificially intelligent agents or bots that pose as real students in order to steal millions of dollars of financial aid that could otherwise go to actual humans.
This claim is completely unsubstantiated. It links to a generic and unrelated SF Gate article. As technologists this claim is plausible given the current state of AI technology, but can we please provide evidence - is it the interviewed teacher making this claim or the SF Gate writer? Are there other sources substantiating this claim?
> A spokesperson for the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office directed SFGATE to a Public Records Request Act request to obtain the exact numbers. However, the office estimates that 0.21% of the system’s financial aid was fraudulently disbursed, the spokesperson said.
0.21% estimate of Community College disbursements. Not UC disbursements or CSU disbursements. Notice no monetary amount is mentioned.
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There are real issues with "flighty" students who don't engage with the material, prolific AI use for many if not most assignments, and some really broken incentives.
There is also amazing free education for almost all income groups. Hard working students who have study groups and engage with faculty and eschew the use of AI because it detracts significantly from their education.
Happy to answer any questions about my experience over the past year completing an Associate Degree for Transfer - it is an excellent opportunity for California residents and I encourage folks of all backgrounds and age groups to explore the services they offer.
EDIT:
Calmatters [1] reported ($10 million) in fraud from community colleges in 2024, that's my bad in my haste to post a response I missed this point.
[1]: https://calmatters.org/education/higher-education/2025/04/fi...
Once scammers can't get access to the money the problem of bots in the classroom will mostly go away.
Is this (as the headline suggests) more of a problem in California? Does California have particularly generous and vulnerable financial aid?
https://www.csac.ca.gov/college-financial-aid-and-safety-for...
Are these bots successfully completing FAFSA forms to the government?
And the government is successfully generating ISIRs to send to the schools?
If yes, then this is a federal ID verification issue.
If not, why are the schools sending aid payments sand ISIR? Or does CA run its own state-level aid programs that skip the federal forms completely (and botching the ID verification on their own)?
Or are all of these effectively stolen IDs? Where the FAFSA and ISIR are for real people (but people who aren't actually students)?
The article is missing a LOT of details, what a waste of time.
If the student aid system verifies identity by, for example, just validating that the applicants know a single 9-digit number that after the Equifax breach should be considered public information, that is a critical problem with their identity verification system and it should be patched.
I was curious, because I (living in central Europe) could not think of a single case of identity theft in my social circles or a prominent case I ever heard of.
A proper national ID and strong privacy laws would be obvious policy wins, but that would require competent lawmakers.
In my lifetime, the most consequential federal legislation has been the DMCA (1998), the Patriot Act (2001), and Obamacare (2010), which effectively marked the end of meaningful legislative power and the handoff of governance to the executive branch.
Apparently people associate it with the authoritarianism of 1984 even though mandatory ID existed in 1948 when the novel was written.
It is not identity theft. It is identity fraud.
Implying that you can lose your identity to someone is a way to shift blame from the banks.
And loan fraud just drives up the cost of loans for everybody else.
And the overhead of fighting this eats into school resources, driving up the tuition that's forcing the loan in the first place.
And as a professor/instructor, that's money that could go to funding more tenured positions (vs adjunct spots or other "non-permanent" teachers).
So, sure, without putting much thought into it, an individual might not care. But after any thought at all, one should see that fraud drives up the cost for all of us.
Not if they continue to ignore it, because once again, it's not their money being sent to scammers.
> And loan fraud just drives up the cost of loans for everybody else.
Doesn't sound like a problem for the involved parties.
> So, sure, without putting much thought into it, an individual might not care. But after any thought at all, one should see that fraud drives up the cost for all of us.
You might care. I might care. But I guarantee that the involved parties do not care for even three seconds of their day about it. They have much more important things to think about, such as what color of the ballons for their kids next birthday party.
yes -- based on real life interaction with real low-level accounting middle class bureaucrats in California, I agree that most of the people who are professionals in Federal student aid do not personally care about this bigger system. More importantly they care about their own paychecks, which most of them use to buy things for their own family events.
Schools have another problem with "ghost students" in general which is that there's a lot of other stuff going on at schools that depend on real students being there. Vendors, club activities, sporting/social events, nearby bars and restaurants etc. There's an entire ecosystem on and around campus which is created or supported by real students. All that non-classroom stuff helps make the school more attractive to students and often directly generates income for the school as well, but little of it would exist or be worthwhile if the campus is a ghost town.
At that time, you could drop classes in the first two weeks for a full refund.
- If you're working/raising a kid/whatever, you don't necessarily have the time to drop into classes that might be full. There is likely a non-zero number of people who see their preferred section is full and don't move beyond that (people taking one-off classes, or slowly working through a professional certificate).
- That's a lot of extra mental bandwidth for all involved. Yeah, it works, but life would be better if it wasn't the norm.
Also, decent human beings care about things that are unjust/immoral/unethical regardless if it affects them or not.
I guess the tax payers money? Otherwise they would have nipped this in the bud.
> Also, decent human beings care about things that are unjust/immoral/unethical regardless if it affects them or not.
Decent people are sometimes quite far between, most people would never lift a finger even an inch if they don't have anything to gain personally.
Personally, I haven't found that to be the case. If you've got sources that say otherwise I'd be interested in seeing them.
Because I've been on the Internet for 25 years to always reply to commenters asking if they have verified sources for their claims. If they don't, that counts as another victory for me, and I can go to bed knowing I was right yet again.
You're at least the second person today who I've asked for a source. I was surprised by what I learned the last time and I'm glad to have learned what I did.
You don't have to feel defeated for not having sources to back up your world view either. Maybe you've lived your life surrounded by terrible people who genuinely wouldn't help someone else more often than not. Maybe it's made you bitter and sarcastic. Maybe it's worth considering where that bias comes from and how well it actually applies to the world beyond your own experience. I asked because I think it usually is. After all, maybe I've just been really lucky and it turns out that people really are most often just selfish and unhelpful. I wouldn't consider being wrong about that a loss or failure on my part, but I would take learning something new to be a win.
Also, since you brought it up, I'm pretty sure I have fact checked a song at some point. Not that song, but I'd guess that I'm not the only one here who has at least once. Folks around here tend to be curious about stuff. Most of the time, requests for sources or more information shouldn't be interpreted as an attack.
Key word: "popular."
A dean's most important question: "How are we gonna pay the bills?"
Well, if the number of ghost students in a department's popular class just doubled and eventually get dropped from the roll, that means the number of bona fide students completing that class also went down.
If you're the professor of that class, you want to make it crystal clear to the dean that this is an otherwise popular class getting hit by a scam, and not a class that's organically becoming less popular year over year.
Communicating this distinction to the dean is paramount-- the prof's pay and job stability depends on the scam being addressed for next quarter/semester. And those concerns bubble up from dept dean up the administration.
I mean, as I write this I start to wonder the opposite of you-- how could anyone in this chain of authority not prioritize addressing this issue?
What involved party shouldn’t care?
There's some truth to this if the people in charge of the process are not the ones paying.
I've seen gratuitous waste in government due to indifference. It can happen in the private sector too.
not necessarily
I don't think this is a correct model of the situation. As far as I know, it isn't the case that there's a fixed budget for student loan disbursals and all of it will go to some school or other unless it gets stolen. Rather, if more people ask for student loans, more money gets disbursed, and if fewer people ask for loans, less money gets disbursed. So the amount of money the school gets wouldn't be affected.
Almost always? There always is
The laughable thing was the Frontline journalists were gobsmacked by people responding to big money incentives. They couldn't believe it!
There are also clinics set up to optimize extracting money from medicare.
If these are the criteria, it seems hard to distinguish high school seniors that are going go through the motions, but don't actually intend to go to college from people who are trying to pocket financial aid without doing the time in the classroom. (Is it financial aid fraud if you legitimately qualify for the aid, and show up to the classroom with no intent to pass or graduate? If the aid is non-recourse, it might be reasonable as a person to do so)
Specifically for California Community Colleges, the stakes are so low for enrollment, I can see a lot of people enrolling just in case, then deciding not to go and forgetting to notify the college. California Community Colleges are an amazing resource, though; I think more people should use them, and more states should build out their community colleges using California as an example. When I was in school in ~2000ish, Wisconsin community college charged the same amount per credit at UW and the Wisconsin Community College system; which seems like a great way to get people not to use community colleges.
What makes SF colleges susceptible to this? Are they implying it's incredibly easy for anyone to fill in a form online without any ID or verification and they get aid? Ok, why was that allowed? I am guessing it's to make it easier for people, to apply but also it looks good for enrollment -- "look at how many students we have". Being strict about verifying applications would mean also lower enrollment numbers. Some classes might not have enough students and would get cancelled. So someone there and possibly many someones looked the other way for many years.
Let's take a look:
https://www.ccsf.edu/apply-ccsf
> Starting February 2, 2024, CCCApply will be integrating identity verification through ID.me. ID.me will help protect student identities and prevent fraudulent students from taking seats in classes at CCSF. This is an optional feature for students.
> For students who cannot use ID.me, click on “Verify Later” to skip the ID.me verification process.
Ok, so still no need for any ID at all, it's all optional.
Yes, they want homeless or undocumented people from no valid identity documentation (from country of origin), minors? to have access. Ok, that's laudable, but shouldn't there be some kind of in person verification at least. I guess "verify later" is that part and it's skipped.
If you want to apply then you're funneled to either federal student aid, or California Dream act aid
https://www.ccsf.edu/paying-college/financial-aid-office/how...
One of those probably make it easier to apply to with a bot and without a valid ID. It would be nice of the article did that research instead of relying on random people do to it for them.
> a student who is seeking asylum, the current administration will attempt to get this data from you to send your student to life in prison in El Salvador.
That could make sense at one level, yeah. But doesn't US CIS already have contact information for all who applied for asylum in order to process the asylum application? And besides, this doesn't seem like an issue that just started this year.
But if they applied for asylum doesn't the US govt already have their information in order to, well, process the asylum application. So, there is nothing for SF College to hide. Not saying that it all has to make sense, but that part doesn't seem to add up somehow.
> A former college president and financial aid director in Atlanta used the names of former students and individuals who never attended the college to fraudulently obtain $5 million in grants.10 ... In another case, two former financial aid advisers and a tax preparation business operator in Chicago were charged with filing fake tax returns to obtain nearly $1.5 million in financial aid for 75 students over a 2-year period.
That's interesting. Maybe it's worth taking a closer look at the college administration? They have both the access, the knowledge, the opportunity and even the official motive - to bolster admission numbers.
Just like identity theft etc.
- 70% based on # students (adjusted for whether they're part time or full time)
- 20% based on # students who receive Pell Grants or similar
- 10% based on student outcomes like graduation or transfers to four-year colleges
Fake students would inflate the first two. So, even if fake students deflate the final item (eventually), what incentive do community college leaders (who presumably care about the number of staff they're able to employ) have to expel fake students, or even to be honest about their prevalence?
The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero. If your financial aid process actually has 0% fraud then it is guaranteed that (1) you spent more resources vetting applicants than saving from fraud and (2) a large chunk of deserving applications were denied in the process just to be extra careful. So the 0.21% seems pretty reasonable to me.
Given the evolution of the technology, I’d say 0.21% is neither static and guaranteed to raise significantly in the to near future if the identification issues don’t get solved overnight.
A few years ago (this was pre-pandemic, around 2018-19), you could buy those "unlimited-storage, never-expiring" Google Drive accounts online. I was curious about how they worked, and it turned out a few of my less knowledgeable friends had some. The ones I could get my hands on were all @ccsf.edu addresses, with randomly-generated but somewhat plausible-sounding names and surnames (something like "Zyx Ngehirda" or "Anqomi Horezis", names made up but it's roughly what they looked like).
From what I could figure out from these, I think you were able to sign up as a CCSF student with very little verification, and as long as you didn't take any courses, you didn't have to pay. You still got all your accounts set up though, including Google Drive, and you could sell those for a profit.
The accounts weren't actually as unlimited as the seller claimed, I asked a few months later and they were apparently shut down by that point. One person reported receiving an angry email (on that Google account) notifying them that the account will be removed if they don't sign up for a course.
This scam must have been heavily automated and very widespread, the accounts were sold on Allegro (Polish Amazon) for $1-$2. It's possible other institutions were involved too, the few accounts I knew of were bought at roughly the same time, so they could have come from the same "batch."
This is weird wording, or perhaps just lazy.
It’s probably supposed to mean fraudulently claimed, because fraudulently disbursed means the agent perform the dispersal is acting fraudulently.
Though there’s also the possibility of that.
darkwizard42•16h ago
This would root out all fraud and feels relatively low barrier for a community college student who would presumably be in the community.
KerrAvon•15h ago
dmurray•15h ago
To deter scammers without the real applicants paying for it, you need quality, not quantity: proof of identity that is harder to fake.
mistrial9•15h ago
lazyasciiart•14h ago
mistrial9•14h ago
Take a look at how real financial crime is done.. the ones that know what they are doing, not the amateurs. Obviously the first item in a plan is "what is the cost of being caught" and quickly, "how can I get this to happen without doing it myself and getting caught" .. so it is a cooperative agreement, to be corrupt. The most successful of the corrupt never do any illegal things at all, they simply look the other way. Next is finding someone desperate, or far away, to "do the crime" but the successful person is involved somehow, in the most distant way possible.
Do I really have to type this out? I am guessing anyway. Did I say "the admins are making fraud things at night?" no. They mostly do not, but that does not make them not involved. Read what I wrote, that is what I meant to say here.
lazyasciiart•2h ago
darkwizard42•12h ago
alistairSH•15h ago
Either way, this shouldn't get as far as it does. You can't just sign up for a class and expect financial aid - there are forms to submit (usually prior to enrollment) to verify ID, income, parental income, veteran status, and a whole host of other factors that impact the FA award amounts and whether that FA is a grant (often federal) or a loan (sometimes gov-backed, sometimes not).
darkwizard42•12h ago
Also I disagree with the premise of online classes not requiring some portion of enrollment being in person. The two can be compatible and probably drops this to zero.