It seems like they're attacking the wrong end of the problem by trying to detect fake students in the classrooms. If the issue is that people are signing up for financial aid and then disappearing with the cash they'd be better off making sure that the people who get financial aid actually are who they say they are before sending them money, or better yet stop giving cash as financial aid and instead give some type of credit that can only be spent on/at the school.
Once scammers can't get access to the money the problem of bots in the classroom will mostly go away.
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.
Often issues such as this are the result of people involved in the verification process, being bribed or taking cash for approvals. This is even more likely to happen if you outsource part of the process.
It's been a few years since I was in college, but back in the '00s when it was relevant to me, there was nothing I could do to get cash. I submitted financial aid documents (to include federally-subsidized loans), and money went from the lender to the school. If there was an underpayment, I had to submit more docs and the lender sent more money. If there was an overpayment, the school refunded the lender and my statement was updated.
Other than completely unsecured private loans how the hell are 18 year olds getting cash for their student loans?
Yeah I’m puzzled by this too - I suppose it helped that I wasn’t living in school housing, I was living at home for most of college, so my only college expenses were tuition, transportation, and supplies, all of which could be paid directly by my loan issuers but - yeah, I never saw a cent of cash, either through student loans or financial aid, it all just went directly to my school.
I got a cash deposit for living expenses. I had to pay rent, after all, while out of town at school. Hell, I needed food too. The payment to the school was handled exactly as you say.
When I did my degree many moons ago in three UK I got a student loan like many people. The loan company sends the money directly to the university not the student. Weirdly though when I did my masters they sent the money to me.
Students aren't able to get into classes when bots are taking all the spots. Teachers actually care about educating students so they don't want to have their time wasted by bots. There's only so much loan money to go around and the schools want to get that cash into their own pockets, but the schools don't get any when scammers are running off with it to funnel money to other countries or whatever else they're doing. Similarly, students who really need the help can't get it when it all goes to someone who isn't interested in paying for education.
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.
The lost money comes from the taxpayer. But that loan money was going to be used to pay the school; and presumably if the student doesn’t have that loan money, they ain’t gonna be paying (or attending, because they can no longer afford to do so). So schools should care. And the students should care — they don’t get to join the school. And the government should care — their funds just went into a void. And the taxpayers should care — their money just went into a void, and some number of their kids just got denied college access.
Uh, federal financial aid is absolutely all of our money (acquired from taxes).
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.
> Of the 40 students enrolled in her popular introduction to real estate course, 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.
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?
I don't know what CCSF's problem is, but this is the second major fraud case I know of that involves them specifically.
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 easy money for schools, students and faculty. Everyone except the taxpayers are making money. I taught at a CC and this went on for years-real students enrolling and not attending, false identities enrolled, no mandatory drops for students not attending or doing work. Why? Well, between Pell grants, scholarships and other grant sources, "students" are making 10-30K tax free, the school keeps all the payments if the "student" stays enrolled through census date as well as keeping all of their grant money, indirect and directs on TRIO grants, etc. Faculty sign these students out after the census date, thus having an EASY class(and breaking the law--that form requires a date of last attendance). I was not in CA and I watched dozens of students do this and the college was "blind" to the fraud...very convenient. The 'agonizing' problem is the scrutiny on a multi-million/billion dollar scam. We need students in these classes to call and report to ED when their class shows 20 enrolled but only 2 turn up each class. Offer them some student loan forgiveness and make then aware of what it costs them.
Like others mentioned, they describe the 'agonizing' problem, but don't explain how it works. The most charitable read is it's just plain old lazy journalism, the least charitable is they are hiding something and dancing around the issue.
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.
> 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
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.
That's a good summary, thanks! It covers Pell Grants well.
> 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.
Perhaps they are targeting community colleges in general, because of the proportion of online course there is higher and they usually have fewer IT and administrative workers to keep an eye on things. That's disheartening, community college, are gems and it help many people get up on their feet who can't afford to go to the larger universities.
I agree, I think it's dancing around the issue of identification, possibly undocumented persons, international students and cultural sensitivity. To push for greater identity verification could be interpreted by some as leaning in towards the mandatory ID political issue. Basically, schools don't want to be seen supporting mandatory ID because it makes them look aligned with the conservatives/Trump.
It’s not really about looks. If you collect this data, and enroll 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. Which is an impact a bit beyond looking aligned. (Of course, reasonable people can disagree about whether life in prison is an appropriate punishment for seeking asylum through legal channels)
> the office estimates that 0.21% of the system’s financial aid was fraudulently disbursed, the spokesperson said
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.
I think that depends on the ratio between detected and undetected fraud. Some fraud will only be detected once they find no one to pay for loans, or when the person being collected has go thru an insurmountable bureaucracy to prove they never enrolled it.
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.
"The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero."
No, the optimal amount of fraud is ZERO.
The cost of fraud detection and prevention is different, but in an ideal society, the taxpayers aren't paying for fraud (because the people don't scam the government).
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.
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.
> In the 2024 calendar year, the [California Community College] chancellor’s office estimates that 31.4% of its college applications were fraudulent, a spokesperson for the office told SFGATE. The chancellor’s office also considers it fraudulent both to apply to a college with no intention of attending any institution and to enroll in a college with no intention of actually showing up.
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.
And elsewhere it says "the office estimates that 0.21% of the system’s financial aid was fraudulently disbursed" which sounds pretty low and maybe not worth worrying about. "Zero fraud" sounds nice but probably costs more to attain than it's worth.
This isn't limited just to California. I teach at a community college in the midwest and we have encountered this too in our online classes. Last semester I had 3-4 in one online class that were fake but a colleague had about 1/3 of her class.
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.
I see mentions of "bots" and "AI" all over the article but is there a single actual example that shows that the fake students are AI bots? As opposed to the much simpler explanation that real people are signing up, collecting aid and then ghosting?
Readit News
Once scammers can't get access to the money the problem of bots in the classroom will mostly go away.
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.
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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...
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.
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_.)
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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.
Also, decent human beings care about things that are unjust/immoral/unethical regardless if it affects them or not.
What involved party shouldn’t care?
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.
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?
Many students use their F.A. to pay for groceries or rent.
Turning it into company store credit is a really bad idea.
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."
Tragic
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 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.
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.
https://lao.ca.gov/Education/EdBudget/Details/620
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.
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.
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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.
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