“Bot” students enroll in US community colleges to steal financial aid

“Bot” students are using fake aliases, enrolling in community college classes, and submitting AI-generated homework in order to collect millions of dollars in state and federal aid money. Colleges are struggling to respond.

According to a new investigative report by Voice of San Diego, a non-profit news organization in California, the onslaught of enrollments from “bot” students has become the biggest issue facing community colleges across the US.

The problem has hit California especially hard. Shockingly, about 25% of community college applicants in the Golden State were bots – not real human students, the state chancellor’s office said last year.

As an example, Elizabeth Smith, a professor at Southwestern College, found it suspicious that her online classes were completely full when the spring semester began. She soon whittled down the 104 students enrolled in her classes to just 15. The rest, she said, were fake.

There’s an explanation for this bot phenomenon. Crooks are abusing the fact that the number of online classes offered by community classes has exploded ever since the pandemic forced schools into the online world.

The goal is to fraudulently obtain state and federal financial aid money, which is usually distributed to community college students.

You just have to remain enrolled long enough for aid disbursements to go out – and because community colleges accept all applicants, they’re swamped in fraud, leaving professors and teachers no choice but to play cops and investigators, Voice of San Diego said.

The crisis isn’t slowing down. During 2024 alone, fake students at California community colleges swindled more than $11 million in financial aid dollars – more than double what was stolen the year before.

What’s more, while some bots don’t submit classwork and just hope to skate by, others frequently use AI programs to generate it.

For a teacher not necessarily trained in AI detection, determining what’s real, what’s AI-generated, and what’s just good old-fashioned cheating can be a daunting task.

To be fair, though, $11 million is not a lot when compared to the roughly $1.7 billion in federal aid and $1.5 billion in state aid given to California’s community college students last year.

But, again, it annoys educators to spend precious time trying to suss out which students are real while real students say the fraudsters are preventing them from actually enrolling in classes.

Experts say there are ways to identify fraud more quickly. Emails from purported students requesting they be added to the class are usually nearly identical and feature clunky phrases such as “I kindly request” or “I look forward to your positive response.”

Besides, numerous tech companies have been brought in to help with the authentication effort – even though the bad actors, as per usual, quickly adapt.

That’s why Southwestern doesn’t want to disclose how it’s identifying fraudulent students through its new Inauthentic Enrollment Mitigation Taskforce. Doing so would only help fraudsters find workarounds.