Posted on 04/17/2025 5:19:08 AM PDT by karpov
Subtitle: Community colleges have been dealing with an unprecedented phenomenon: fake students bent on stealing financial aid funds. While it has caused chaos at many colleges, some Southwestern faculty feel their leaders haven’t done enough to curb the crisis.
When the spring semester began, Southwestern College professor Elizabeth Smith felt good. Two of her online classes were completely full, boasting 32 students each. Even the classes’ waitlists, which fit 20 students, were maxed out. That had never happened before.
“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,’’ Smith said. “But it quickly became clear that was not the case.”
By the end of the first two weeks of the semester, Smith had whittled down the 104 students enrolled in her classes, including those on the waitlist, to just 15. The rest, she’d concluded, were fake students, often referred to as bots.
“It’s a surreal experience and it’s just heartbreaking,” Smith said. “I’m not teaching, I’m playing a cop now.”
She’s far from the only professor dealing with this trend. Ever since the pandemic forced schools to go virtual, the number of online classes offered by community colleges has exploded. That has been a welcome development for many students who value the flexibility online classes offer. But it has also given rise to the incredibly invasive and uniquely modern phenomenon of bot students now besieging community college professors like Smith.
The bots’ goal is to bilk state and federal financial aid money by enrolling in classes, and remaining enrolled in them, long enough for aid disbursements to go out. They often accomplish this by submitting AI-generated work.
(Excerpt) Read more at voiceofsandiego.org ...
We live in the Age of Fake where everything is fake.
Fake, gay and retarded is full indictment, currently.
Well stop that, and more problem. Not hard.
I can only imagine how much of the GDP is driven by such fakers.
Cause hey, economic activity is economic activity regardless...
I sure hope they don’t teach computer security there.
Righty tighty completely the government funds spigot, and this “first world” problem self-corrects.
“You would not have this fraud if people were paying for their own college classes.”
Or if the classes were not entirely online. If “Students” had to show up they’d not be able to do this
“ Well stop that, and more problem. Not hard.”
Don’t send the money to the student. Send it directly to the school after they pass the class. That’s what I did. I think their finance (do they still call it Bursor) department’s information systems are out of date.
We would not have this fraud if the governments providing the funds did some basic vetting of their applicants.
A simple requirement to submit a photo of your drivers license (or other state-issued photo ID) would do.
Bots can’t fake that without access to DMV records.
Why is this happening?
We wanted to make it easier for poor people to go to college. Bilking community colleges is easy work.
How naive can one be to teach in a California community college and be surprised that you have mostly bots for students only there to defraud a financial aid program? California and Colorado are the closest places to Idiocracy that I have ever seen.
My first thought is that you would not have this kind of fraud if the aid were going directly to the college for tuition/fees payment. Then, on second thought, I realized this is California. Thus you might still have the fraud even if the beneficiary was a Government entity.
From my personal experience, my friends and family members who got financial aide to go to community college weren’t productive students who were learning anything. So maybe giving bots financial aid isn’t a bad idea.
Easy to fix, HUD sends support funds directly to land lords. The renter never touches it. Student support funds should work the same way.
Yep. Against the backdrop of a surreal, Hellish, hollowed-out society void of any unifying moral compass. (Jeez, I need to re-frame my morning! Maybe a second cup of coffee will help...)
You could also stop it by requiring people to show up IN PERSON to make applications, with requisite ID.
But I’d be happy to cut off the loans, too.
“You would not have this fraud if people were paying for their own college classes.”
Exactly. Doing away with federal financial aid would do away with many of the problems with our colleges.
Thans seems harder than just taking the class and learning something.
Do they offer degrees in “Government Fraud”?
If nobody shows up for class then no money gets dispersed. Unless these Bots are sending Holograms to sit in the chairs. I’m sure that the lefties would have a fit of the notion that kids might actually have to come to class in person and listen to a lecture.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.