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What do you get when you make community college access easier? This hellscape of massive endless fraud.
California’s community colleges are reporting a rise in financial aid fraud. In January, suspected bots represented 1 in 4 college applicants. Schools have given away millions to these scams, and college officials say fraudsters are getting smarter with the help of AI.
1 in 4. The sheer scope of this is massive.
The reports show that between September 2021 and January 2024, the colleges received roughly 900,000 fraudulent college applications and gave fraudsters more than $5 million in federal aid, as well as nearly $1.5 million in state and local aid.
Entire classes are filling up with fake students.
“If I saw, for example, that a college that only gets 1,000 applications in some time frame gets 5,000, you kind of know something is probably up,” said Valerie Lundy-Wagner, a vice chancellor for the community college system.
Online classes that historically don’t fill up were suddenly overwhelmed with students — a sign that many of them might be fake — Coston said. Administrators at other large districts, including the Los Rios Community College District in Sacramento, the Mt. San Antonio Community College District in Walnut, California and the Los Angeles Community College District, told CalMatters that fraudsters are evading each new cybersecurity strategy.
The reason for the reported increase in fraud is because the chancellor’s office and college administrators are getting better at detecting it, he said. Since 2022, the state has allocated more than $125 million for fraud detection, cybersecurity and other changes in the online application process at community colleges.
9 figures are now being spent just in an attempt to fight fraud.
Barajas said faculty at East Los Angeles College are so overwhelmed by bots they haven’t discussed the potential risk to their intellectual property: “We’re at such a level where we’re just trying to survive.”
None of this has to be happening.
Remember, COVID mainstreamed Zoom classes which means that students don’t have to show up to class and often don’t even have to turn on their cameras.
The simple solution would be to bring back in-person classes. And not to hand out any kind of money to individuals but to institutions. But COVID turned us into the world’s suckers. The amount of money foreign fraudsters have been stealing from every single COVID relief program is mindboggling. The message is out to the rest of the world to come rip us off. And they don’t even have to come here. They can do it online.
In Sacramento, community colleges started seeing an influx of applications from Russia, China, and India during the start of the pandemic
And, much like open borders, now that the rest of the world knows how easy it is to rip us off, they’re not letting up.
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Too bad. The California Community Colleges were a good intermediate step between high school and a regular college. I don’t think one even needed to graduate from high school to enroll. So the dummies still had a chance to get educated.
Any prosecutions for this fraud? If not, why did they bother spending the money on fraud detection? They may as well spend the money on detecting shoplifting in San Francisco.
If the the fraud is detected before money is disbursed then the $125 million is well spent because the fraud is sure to be more than that but who knows with all the stupid college administrators and government bureaucrats involved.
Excellent questions, funny, and true.
Of course, with the political minds in Sacramento that have and continue to ruin the once great State of California, we all know the answer.
Got my degree from one. Turned out professionals ready for the business world unlike the university where my wife and I both worked at one time
Yes, anybody was eligible for community colleges here and many of the degrees were actually good ones, even without using them as an intermediate step, especially the forestry ones.
Last I knew, the Pell Grants and Stafford loans went straight to the colleges and anybody who got the grant was forced to accept the loan, too. Each one was designed to pay for half of the scholarship. That ripped off the students because they were forced to take out a loan and then rely on the school to dole out money for books, materials and meager cost of living expenses.
I guess the rules have changed and now it’s the financial aid system being ripped off. Leave it to schools, state governments and the federal government to make incompetence an art form.
Good point in the last paragraph. There is darn little the government does well.
It reminds one of DEI hiring practices for airline pilots, airline mechanics, brain surgeons. It’s time to reconsider flying commercially and then pray no one gets a brain tumor. Let the wealthy elites fly commercial and visit their DEI MD.
I remember when President Trump provided a very generous amount of money for people laid off due to Covid and I applied. Hundreds of millions of dollars were ripped off in CA by convicts, wet backs and other thieves but I got turned down for false reasons which blatantly contradicted the facts and written policy THREE fucking times. I had to contact the court and judges in charge of the Employment Development Department each time. Each time they immediately overturned the denial and the first two times the cunts (all women as is typical with government agencies) in the EDD offices denied me again, but the third time, the judge commanded the cunts to expedite my claim and that they would be subjected to criminal charges if they didn’t. Ha HAW! All told, the process took over a year. The cunts were hoping the whole time I would give up in frustration and all three judges confirmed that. I know that the cunts saw the German name “Bargholz” and my race and decided to turn down a white “Nazi” who wasn’t Latin or Black like the convicts and wet backs. I eventually got $16,000. and sent emails, letters and phone messages mocking all those cunts and telling them the amount of my award. I lost a lot more than $16,000. in the lay-off but $16,000. was more than good enough for me. I wish I could’ve seen the looks on their faces. The judges were all sympathetic and cool.
The FCC is the only government agency I know of that’s worth a shit. I contacted them yesterday and the problem was resolved today, just like the last time. ATT tried to rip me off and everybody else in the FCC program for wifi discounts. I got a call and polite voice mail from the head of the Oakland Executive Office, whatever that is and ignored it. Later I got the same from the “President” of the DC office and ignored that, too. I’m not going to let them tell the FCC that they resolved my issue. I resolved it myself by canceling my service yesterday, April first.
“In Sacramento, community colleges started seeing an influx of applications from Russia, China, and India during the start of the pandemic”
Why is an institution calling itself a “community” college taking applicants from Russia, China and India? You mean to tell me the geniuses that run these schools didn’t see that as a possible problem? Sometimes you get scammed because you deserve it.
It’s possible the the scammers were using fake American names and addresses and the new security measures caught them out but I wouldn’t know.
True, for sure. Education is not the field of brilliant, credentialed dudes and dudettes.
A PhD in education is roughly equivalent to a general education and non-rigorous.
I used to be an English teacher and it was the easiest job I ever had. I liked it, though. The students made it enjoyable. Lazy teachers who yearn for the Wuhan covid days of remote schooling are weirdos. The interaction with the students is what made the job enjoyable for me.
It was so easy I didn’t even have to prepare lessons. Most of the other teachers would and I always wondered why they had to prepare for something they did 3 to 6 times a day five days a week.
i suppose it would be asking too much. if public schools and government employment agencies handing out taxpayer money to fraudsters be held liable for the incompetence. think we have a law on the books. again the failure to enforce the law. unless of course your a citizen who makes the effort to obey the law, then by all means the full measure. justice of convenience is what we have in america. at this point we may be better off firing the derelicts and saving the money for civil society.
$125M for fraud detection. They might as well just give that money away as it might be less. How many scholarships would $125M pay for.
Surely it would not be infeasible to include an assessment of written English skills in the application and to construct it so that only a real person could complete it in a meaningful way – maybe including comprehension, or multiple choice questions with varying weightings, rather than one correct answer and three incorrect ones.
One problem, sir, just one is that they already assert that mathematics is racist and a value put upon nonwhites in their act of white rules the world. Thus, how much more likely will they label any attempt at scholarship like comprehension of English grammar and literature will be scorned as racist, white oppression? Answer: 99.9999% they will.
What we are witnessing here, now, is the fall of a great civilization. We are at the upper limits of most that have been lost. What is surprising, imv, is the speed with which we have fallen. But then, as some say: first is was slow, then it happened very fast.
Ernest Hemingway.
wo things:
dattid be RAY cyst.
they don’t care. Itts all a scam to destabilise society and funnel money to those what refuse to EARN it.