California colleges are being inundated with GHOST students who have a very sinister purpose
Artificial Intelligence (AI) bots are infiltrating California college classes in a financial aid fraud scheme, costing the state and federal government millions of dollars.
Professors across Golden State community colleges have noticed an uptick in non-participative students, specifically in virtual classes, since the pandemic.
Alarmingly, a significant portion of these passive enrollees have not actually been human, but AI-generated 'ghost students.'
These bots have been creeping their way into online courses and taking spots away from real students to scam money from financial aid and scholarship programs.
Since community colleges have high acceptance rates, these academic institutions have been easy targets.
Over the last 12 months, state colleges reportedly handed off $10 million in federal funds and $3 million in states funds to fake students, according to CalMatters.
Data collected from the start of 2025 indicates schools have already thrown away $3 million in federal aid and about $700,000 in state funds.
This is a jarring increase from the period between September 2021 and December 2023, when fake students reportedly drew in more than $5 million in federal money and $1.5 million in state funds.
This growingly prominent scam has left professors disheartened. Instead of focusing on the quality of their teaching, they must probe their students to make sure they are legitimate.
'I am very intentional about having individualized interaction with all of my students as early as possible,' City College of San Francisco professor Robin Pugh told SFGate.
'That included making phone calls to people, sending email messages, just a lot of reaching out individually to find out "Are you just overwhelmed at work and haven't gotten around to starting the class yet? Or are you not a real person?"'
In previous years, Pugh said she only had to pluck about five people from her 40-student online introductory real estate course for not engaging with her at the start of the semester.
But this spring, she had to slash 11 students - most of them bots - from the class.
Roughly 20 percent of 2021 college applicants were likely fraudulent, CalMatters reported. In January 2024, the number of fake applications rose to 25 percent.
The fraction shot up this year, with 34 percent of applications being suspected 'ghost students.'
'It's been going on for quite some time,' Wendy Brill-Wynkoop, the president of the Faculty Association of California Community Colleges and a professor at College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita, told SFGate.
'I think the reason that you're hearing more about it is that it's getting harder and harder to combat or to deal with.
'I have heard from faculty friends that the bots are getting so smart, they're being programmed in a way that they can even complete some of the initial assignments in online classes so that they're not dropped...'
Berkeley City College librarian Heather Dodge realized her online course was packed with the scammer bots when she asked students to submit a brief introductory video of themselves so she could get to know them, despite never meeting in person.
'I started noticing that there would be a handful of students that wouldn't submit that assignment in the first week,' she told CalMatters.
After emailing them - and not receiving a response - she dropped them from her class.
Southwestern College professor Elizabeth Smith had a similar experience this spring, when two of her online courses and their waiting lists were completely maxed out.
'Teachers get excited when there's a lot of interest in their class. I felt like, "Great, I'm going to have a whole bunch of students who are invested and learning,"' she told The Hechinger Report.
'But it quickly became clear that was not the case.'
Of the 104 students in the classes and on the waitlists, only 15 of the ended up being real people.
Professors have a specified time frame to move people from their roster so they cannot get financial aid for the class. However, after that period, it is more difficult to remove them.
Educators are also weary of becoming overzealous with their cuts - accidentally mistaking an actual student, possibly experiencing technical difficulties, for a scammer-sent agent.
'Maybe they didn't have a webcam, maybe they didn't understand the assignment. It was really hard to suss out what was going on with them,' Dodge explained.
This was the case for Martin Romero, a journalism major at East Los Angeles College, who was mistook for a bot and wrongfully dropped from a class.
On his first day of classes last fall, he failed to log onto class, so his professor swiftly removed him.
'I was freaking out,' the 20-year-old told CalMatters.
He emailed the professor to try to rectify the issue, but the course was already filled up again.
In the grand scheme of college funding, the California Community Colleges Chancellor's Office estimated only a fraction of a percent of financial aid was handed out to scammers, SFGate reported.
Chris Ferguson, a finance executive at the chancellor's office, told CalMatters the scope of the fraud is 'relatively small' considering that California community colleges received $1.7 billion in federal aid and $1.5 billion in state aid last year.
Catherine Grant of the Department of Education's Office of Inspector General, which is tasked with handling fraud, told CalMatters her team is 'committed to fighting student aid fraud wherever we find it.'
CalMatters discovered that the FBI busted a scammer ring at Los Angeles Harbor College and West Los Angeles College in June 2022 after being tipped off by the department.
These fraudsters used at least 57 AI identities to steal more than $1.1 million in federal aid and loans over four years.
Another document from the education department to the FBI revealed at least 70 fake students were enrolled at Los Angeles City College 'for the sole purpose of obtaining financial aid refund money.'
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