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.
Federal Loan/Grant Money --> School--> Student
Private Loan Money --> Student--> School/Bills
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.
---
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...
https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/driver-licenses-identification...
Similarly, there are mechanisms that allow victims of crimes to seek help from the police without fear of deportation.
Makes sense to me. I'm much more worried about road safety and crime than people coming to the US then paying payroll and sales taxes, but not being able to claim federal benefits.
Which is well and good, but then the original question still applies: how do the bots manage to get past all these requirements?
Fraud is still fraud.
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.
Quite often the impersonator had nothing to do with the collection of the identity itself. There are people that 'copy' things like insecure online information around identity, but there are also people that physically steal things like drivers licenses and birth certificates. This is the stage of a crime that I'd consider actual identity theft. After that you have black market information brokers. They didn't capture the identities in the first place. They don't directly use the information to impersonate others and yet they are still complicit in a crime. Then you have the final stage of impersonation fraud as you state.
Is it?
If I look at least somewhat like you, grab your ID, and stuff you in an incinerator then any ID system that does not take detailed biometrics will have no clue if I'm you or not.
Saying identity is intrinsic is tantamount to saying "I am that I am". I mean, that's cool and all, but that tells me nothing about who you actually are.
There is nothing intrinsic about your name for example. This can and does change for people.
Again, same with location where you live.
We spend our entire lives grown up and getting old, so how we look adapts.
Then you get down to bio markers like fingerprints or dna, but these are recent inventions when it comes to human identification and take a fair bit of technology to use successfully.
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 suspect the issue is similar here with the multi stakeholder problem here. The college needs as many paying students as possible, the workload of the staff should be as low as possible, the office giving out loans wants to have a low workload... All in all good scammers will serve all these needs and happily take the money in the process.
When someone tricks a bank in a way that harms you, the legal question governing your recovery from the bank is, “Did the bank act negligently, and did that negligence cause you harm?”
Unlike normal life, where “negligent” means “I didn’t enjoy it,” under the law there are several required elements that constitute negligence. One required element of negligence is that for a party’s negligence create liability, the alleged negligent party must have owed the harmed party a duty at the time of the breach of that duty.
Duty can arise in several ways according to state common and statutory law. For example, a doctor owes the duty of the standard of care to his patient. A driver owes the duty to drive the speed limit to other motorists. The question of whether duty exists in any situation is a complex question of law.
One thing that isn’t complicated, though: in every jurisdiction I’ve researched, a bank owes no duty to a non-customer.
This is why victims of identity fraud don’t sue the bank that granted fraudulent accounts: there is no negligence and will this be no recovery. (With the caveat that I’ve seen people who were harmed by a bank where they randomly happened to have an account… in this circumstance, duty can be ascribed to the bank because a banker-customer relationship in which duty is rooted exists).
Corollary: open an account at every major bank to establish a duty-relationship everywhere.
Poor startup idea of the day: Accounts-at-every-bank-as-a-Service.
> "Identity theft" is a term coined by banks to try to make it sound like random people should have to deal with the fallout of the banks' bad identity verification practices.
The problem isn't the banks, the problem is that unlike Europe where in most countries it's commonplace for everyone to have a government-issued ID document, the US does not have that requirement and so companies of all sorts abuse documents not meant for that purpose like SSNs or driver licenses that can be trivially forged.
Banks can't invent security out of thin air when a significant part of the US population believes that mandating possession of one is a surefire way into a dictatorship or whatnot.
For example: https://www.reddit.com/r/Banking/comments/1csl00q/any_banks_...
Zero. Because FINCEN/KYC[0] laws in the US mandate identification for all customers.
Which means that at least 3% of the populations is "unbanked"[1]:
Some reasons a person might not have a bank account
include:
Lack of access via a nearby bank branch or mobile phone
Minimum balance fees
Distrust of the banking system, typically due to lack of transparency
regarding fees and deposit timing[1]
No access to government-issued ID, which is required to open a bank account
To avoid delinquent debts, such as creditors seizing the account in
judgements, or the government collecting back taxes or child support
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unbanked
Edit: Fixed subject/verb agreement (laws/mandate)/fixed quote formatting.
https://www.bankhelp.gov/help-topics/bank-accounts/required-...
Add on top of that undocumented people or the issues surrounding the Native American population and their partial autonomy rights, and it becomes a mess very very quickly because it won't stay at "about three percent".
And then they have someone with an incomprehensible accent in a call center that probably also runs scam calls calling you up and asking for your password as part of their ordinary SOP.
They deploy fancy new tech like "verifying your voice" with some AI crap while simultaneously not allowing your password to have more than 8 characters. (Which must have two symbols but if one of them is ` you'll experience random spontaneous logouts).
There may be many causes of the disaster that is bank security, people not having ID is absolutely not part of it.
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.
Coincidentally and/or anecdotally I've never had my identity stolen.
One of those two is as of last week or so required to board a flight in the USA.
> Compare this to Europe, where every resident has an eID containing a keypair and X.509 certificate signed by the government containing their personal details.
The first time I had a chance to use was just some months ago, when I could activate a SIM-card online through and my smartphone reading out my ID-card via NFC. I pay daily via NFC, but it's the first time ever I had to use the chip in my ID-Card, despite it having one for 15 years now. Laws and regulations are good in theory, but reality can be often quite a bit different.
Only if you assume that anyone who works for a SEC regulated company[0], applies for a California driver's license[1], current and former US Military personnel[2] healthcare workers, teachers, real estate agents, child care providers and others[3] are either "criminals" or "tourists."
If so, into which bucket would you place CA driver's license applicants? Criminals? How about US Military personnel? Tourists?
Please do elucidate.
[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/17/240.17f-2
[1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/occu...
[2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1440f
[3] https://blog.certifixlivescan.com/state-by-state-guide-to-fi...
But you wouldn't know anything about that, would you Ivan, especially since many (most?) Americans don't have a passport.
Are your papers in order, Ivan? It would be a shame if you ended up in a Siberian gulag, eh?
Also I always thought that it is weird, having to take driving exams to get an ID and calling an ID a "driver's license".
[1]https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-...
The iOS app is surprisingly decent. She could still request the old, paper-only id but this one could be also used to pay for local ordinances straight from her phone, and it's less cumbersome than the SPID-based[1] authentication.
[1]https://it-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/SPID?_x_tr_sl...
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 or whatever entity being defrauded.
But there’re tons of scams involving stealing your personal id and security codes. It’s wide spread from Belgium to Estonia.
I think the current solution is to have users scan a QR code, if they are on a different device than the one with their authenticator app. I haven't hear of anyone with the hardware token being scammed though, but most of the people who have the hardware version, do so because we don't even trust an app on our phone.
But yes, there are PLENTY of cases of identity theft even in countries with electronic identification solutions.
One thing the US could do, but won't, is have an account registered with the federal and state governments. Any money coming from the government should ONLY go to that account and it changing it should require a thorough identity validation.
Often, posters on HN engage in pedophilia, tax evasion and satanic rituals. This is even more likely if you allow just anyone to create an account.
That's ridiculous, right? Because I provide no evidence for my statement whatsoever. And yet, I manage to paint every HN user with that broad brush.
It's an example of 'reductio ad absurdum'. If you have any evidence that your hypothesis is any more valid than mine, please do provide it. Otherwise, you're just smearing people without any reason except to validate your world view.
SIM card swaps have been reportedly repeatedly, as being a social engineering hack. Often the exchange has been done via gift cards or crypto. More than one such hack resulted in millions being stolen.
Your attack dog response is quite unwarranted. Why are you so upset at a generic comment, indicating that fraudulent identity verification can be done on both ends?
Do you imagine that university admissions employees are perfect, uncorruptible? Is this some weird, US political minefield?
You didn't say that financial aid administrators were being "socially engineered. Nor did you say that they had their SIMs swapped. Rather, you said[0]:
"Often issues such as this are the result of people involved in the verification process, being bribed or taking cash for approvals."
>Do you imagine that university admissions employees are perfect, uncorruptible? Is this some weird, US political minefield?
I do not. But I also don't make completely unsupported accusations/attacks against random strangers as you did. Not a "political minefield" at all. You were just talking out of your ass and I called you on it. Full stop.
My statement is entirely valid in this context.
Social engineering attacks are a well known method to hack, and masquerading as others is indeed a hack.
I don't know about evidence, but logically your example is bad. One is talking about specifically fraud issues, and their most likely cause. You're just generally talking about people.
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.
That kind of immoral act? You might not be as decent a person as you might think.
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.
Many students use their F.A. to pay for groceries or rent.
Turning it into company store credit is a really bad idea.
Let's say in 10-15 years they'll have robots that can pass for humans as well. Then what? How are you going to tell who's a real human?
(Isaac Asimov, _The Caves of Steel_.)
Other than completely unsecured private loans how the hell are 18 year olds getting cash for their student loans?
I'm curious how that even happens, it's pretty hard to get actual cash back after the banks send the money to the school on your behalf.
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.
It's was sad to see in https://leb.fbi.gov/articles/featured-articles/pell-grant-fr... that in one case the administrators of the college were the criminals doing it.
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.
If fraud detection is so expensive, maybe it's important to be more selective of who has access to the community and keep the scammers out.
"Ideal society" doesn't exist.
And how would you "be more selective" and "keep scammers out" without incurring more costs? At some point, it costs way more to prevent the last 0.1% or 0.001% of fraud than would be saved by preventing said fraud. And the cost might be paid by non-fraud being detected as false positive.
I worked in retail loss prevention, what is acceptable isn’t optimal.
Your salary was the exact kind of thing that needs to be balanced against the cost of fraud; if it was larger than the amount of fraud you prevented, then the company would have been better off just accepting the fraud as a cost of doing business. The closer you get to zero fraud, the more expensive it becomes to reduce it further (and the more likely your countermeasures will negatively impact the business in other ways), so there definitely is an "optimal" balance to be struck between fraud and preventive measures.
Simply put every living system on the planet earth has some amount of parasites. To have no parasites at all would require massive amounts of energy by the host to ensure said parasites don't exist. If the host can spend a much smaller amount of energy and ensure that 99% of parasites don't exist that is optimal thereby negating your original premise.
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.
They start the class doing work so that means we have to grade it. I first became suspicious when these fake students were posting message board posts that were all weirdly indented like they were from an email reply chain. I thought it was weird until I talked to my colleague who had the same thing. Then one of htem posted a message that was "Hello, I am a student from [insert town name here]...."
We turned the names in and the university used an id verification system and got them out of the class.
Raiden Warned About AI Censorship - MGS2 Codec Call (2023 Version)
darkwizard42•7mo 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•7mo ago
dmurray•7mo 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•7mo ago
lazyasciiart•7mo ago
mistrial9•7mo 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•7mo ago
throwaway173738•7mo ago
darkwizard42•7mo ago
alistairSH•7mo 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•7mo 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.