It’s not the fault of California’s community colleges that fraudsters filed thousands of fake student applications, many through bots, early during the pandemic. At least 65,000 of them included documents requesting financial aid as federal relief money flowed to colleges. At the time, campuses were closed, classes were held online, and administrators were hectically trying to keep the colleges operating.
Once the deception was uncovered last fall, the state’s 116 community colleges had an obligation to help document the extent of the problem. But 44 have failed to report their monthly findings on fake applications to the chancellor’s office of the California Community Colleges, including all nine of the campuses of the Los Angeles Community College District. In addition, 15% of community colleges haven’t filed even their preliminary enrollment surveys for the current academic year.
The false applications were uncovered in 2021 through the work of a state financial aid officer, who noticed an unusual number of new applications from people with similar characteristics and other odd enrollment trends. At one point, there were classes made up mostly of fakers who, of course, never showed up. And though the college system announced the problems and their efforts to combat them last September, a criminal justice professor at Pierce College has continued to find hundreds of suspected phony enrollments.
