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Ghost students are creating an 'agonizing' problem for Calif. colleges

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When the pandemic upended the world of higher education, Robin Pugh, a 
professor at City College of San Francisco, began to see one puzzling 
problem in her online courses: Not everyone was a real student.

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. But during the current spring semester, Pugh said that number 
more than doubled when she had to cut 11 students. It’s a strange new 
reality that has left her baffled.

“It’s really unclear to me, and beyond the scope of my knowledge, how 
this is really happening,” she said. “Is it organized crime? Is it 
something else? Everybody has lots of theories.”

Some of the disengaged students in Pugh’s courses are what 
administrators and cybersecurity experts say are “ghost students,” and 
they’ve been a growing problem for community colleges, particularly 
since the shift to online instruction during the pandemic. 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. And as colleges grapple with the 
problem, Pugh and her colleagues have been tasked with a new and 
“frustrating” task of weeding out these bots and trying to decide who’s 
a real person.

The process, she said, takes her focus off teaching the real students.

“I am very intentional about having individualized interaction with all 
of my students as early as possible,” Pugh said. “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?’”

Scope of the student bots
Financial aid fraud is not new, but it’s been on the rise in 
California’s community colleges, Cal Matters reported, with scammers 
stealing more than $10 million in 2024, more than double the amount in 
2023.

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. The 
chancellor’s office was unable to estimate the percentage of fraudulent 
attempts attributed to bots.

“Bots don’t act on their own, there is almost always a human behind it,” 
the spokesperson said in an email.

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 the bots have been enrolling in courses 
since around early 2021.

“It’s been going on for quite some time,” she said. “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.”

Brill-Wynkoop said when she first noticed the problem, it was because 
her course roster had student ID numbers that were all abnormally in 
sequential order. And then when classes would start, those suspicious 
“students” wouldn’t show up or interact at all over email, she said. 
Some of the fraudsters have even been able to complete some coursework, 
such as introductory discussion posts, making it harder to tell who’s real.

“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 by 
[the deadline to drop the class],” she said.

John Hetts, the community college system’s executive vice chancellor for 
research, analytics and data, told SFGATE the fake students cause more 
problems beyond taking funds earmarked for people who really need them. 
The bots also increase the workload for faculty members and make it 
harder for real students to enroll in courses. Though he describes the 
numbers of bots as small, he said any reported number represents only 
the attempts that have been detected and stopped.

“What’s happening is we have a very small proportion of students, or 
individuals, who have made their way through a gauntlet of tests,” Hetts 
said.

An ‘agonizing’ problem
Distinguishing real students from fake ones is a “fraught process” for 
professors, Pugh said.

“It’s pretty agonizing, because you don’t want to eliminate, you don’t 
want to drop a real person,” Pugh said. “It’s a difficult responsibility 
when the system ends up having faculty be the ones to try to do that 
screening like that, feels like a failure to adequately address the 
problem.”

In the 2024 calendar year, the 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. Financial aid fraud, or “the act of attempting to collect 
financial aid to which the applicant is not legally entitled,” is the 
third step in the process and the most sophisticated.

“There’s always been this opportunity to occur by attending an 
institution long enough to claim financial aid,” Hetts said. “What 
[COVID-19] did is, because now you didn’t have to have a person that had 
to physically show up, it created this opportunity — it changed the 
opportunity.”

Since the bot student problem has escalated, the college system has 
implemented additional verification tools for student enrollment, Hetts 
said, such as ID.me, an online multifactor authentication. The 
chancellor’s office has even issued memos to faculty and staff to help 
them identify bots. (Hetts said the chancellor’s office is unable to 
speak on specifics of the tools.)

The problem now, though, is the perpetrators are becoming better at 
committing fraud as AI continues to accelerate, making it difficult for 
colleges to keep up.

“We stop more, and then they discover new techniques and become more 
sophisticated over time, and so we have to constantly pivot,” Hetts said.

‘They find a workaround’
Other college officials expressed similar sentiments, saying AI 
technology is moving too fast. Nicole Albo-Lopez, deputy chancellor and 
professor of the Los Angeles Community College District, told SFGATE 
that her district was hit hard because it’s the largest in the state, 
with nine colleges. At one point, the demographics of her institutions 
completely shifted within a week, she said.

“We are primarily Hispanic-serving institutions, and within a very short 
time frame, one of my colleges became predominantly white, and there was 
just no way with our demographics that that was true,” Albo-Lopez said. 
“So we all kind of didn’t sleep until we figured out what was going on.”

As the district became more familiar with bots, she said it’s changed 
many of its processes, but fake students remain a top problem.

“Every time we have a fix, they find a workaround,” she said. “This is 
something that’s never going to go away. This is going to be part of our 
work, and we’ll have to continue to monitor our processes and our 
policies and adapt alongside them.”

Keeping up with AI tools and cybersecurity defenses can also get 
expensive. According to the chancellor’s office, the college system has 
already invested in fraud monitoring and mitigation, which includes 
measures like upgrading the CCCApply application. The 2022-2023 budget 
provided $100 million for “technology and information security 
purposes,” with $75 million being one-time funds and $25 million being 
ongoing, a chancellor’s spokesperson said.

And with general attacks on higher education funding from the federal 
government, Nick Merrill, a cybersecurity researcher at UC Berkeley, 
told SFGATE that colleges will have to keep putting more resources into 
the problem.

“I don’t really know how we’re going to work our way out of this really 
serious investment, but I hope that when push comes to shove, we get 
that investment and not like ‘Sorry, we’re cutting the budget of 
community colleges again,’” Merrill said.

A desperate call for investments
Merrill said a problem with creating a cybersecurity defense is that 
oftentimes experts don’t know how the attackers are committing fraud, or 
they don’t find out it’s being committed until much later. To navigate 
college applications, the fraudsters are likely using software such as 
Claude AI, a conversational AI tool, or Manus, another autonomous AI 
agent that can perform online tasks. In some cases, scammers could even 
be using other people’s identities, he added.

“On these dark web, or these places where the hackers kind of hang out, 
it’s not terribly expensive to pay for an IP address that originates 
from whatever place you want it to originate from,” Merrill said.

It’s also hard to know who’s responsible for the fraud, whether it’s a 
group of “random teenagers” or an organized crime ring, he said, but 
it’s important to recognize that current AI tools are far beyond 
ChatGPT’s ability to just “cheat on homework,” for example.

“I don’t think [people] understand that there are tools that are fully 
autonomous today,” Merrill said. “You can just be like ‘please apply to 
this community college, fill out the forms however you need to fill them 
out, and once you’re in there do the homework,’ and the agent can just 
fully do that, without any human supervision or intervention. And you 
can spin up five of those for not that much money.”

Both Merrill and Vrajesh Bhavsar, co-founder of San Francisco tech 
startup Operant AI, told SFGATE they believe the technical skills needed 
to pull off the college fraud scheme is not hard.

“These processes that these community colleges or other organizations 
have been using, there are a lot of standard, open-ended questions or 
forms that are easily shareable with LLMs [large language models] and 
you can create simple workflows,” Bhavsar said.

Merrill said he is “very concerned” about how fast the AI tools are 
moving, and it’s important for industries to establish different proof 
of personhood systems.

“It’s a really serious issue,” he said. “The world’s gonna get very, 
very weird within the next, like, couple of years, and people are not 
ready for it.”

As Pugh continues navigating the bot students each semester, she hopes 
administrators put more resources into stopping the fraudsters before 
they make it into the classroom.

In the meantime, Pugh said she advises students go back to the 
“old-fashioned” method of showing up in person on the first day of class 
if they weren’t able to get in.

“I want our educational resources to be available to the people who want 
them — who are real people,” she said.

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/ghost-students-creating-problem-calif-colleges-20311708.php

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