When I first heard from an acquitance who works in California’s community college system that classes were full of fake students, it seemed surreal, but what’s really incredible is the growth rate here.

In 2021, the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office reported that about 20% of college applicants were likely fake. In January 2024, the state said it was up to about 25%.

Now it’s around 34%, according to the most recent data from the last calendar year.

“Those are all the ones that are stopped,” said John Hetts, executive vice chancellor for the data team at the chancellor’s office.

Many are not.

Consider that California’s community colleges went from 1 in 5 fake applicants in 2021, to 1 in 4 last year to 1 in 3 this year.

What accounts for that massive growth? It’s profitable and AI tools have made it all too easy.

In the last 12 months, colleges reported giving more than $10 million in federal dollars to fake students and over $3 million in state money. Data from the first few months of 2025 show that colleges have already given away more than $3 million in federal aid and over $700,000 in state dollars.

There are multiple ways to stop this, but the most obvious is to stop funding ‘virtual’ students who don’t show up for in-person classes. You can have student aid or Zoom class, but not both.

It’s all too easy to run bots out of Pakistan or India, collect the cash and then just have the bots ChatGPT this way through classes.

And at this rate of growth, soon the majority of California community college students will be fake. If you think that’s an exageration, calculate

The current trend line is that 40% of applications will be fake by 2026 and 50% will be fake by 2027.

By 2028, a majority of California community college applications will be fake. And we’ll be subsdizing foreign scammers to ‘educate’ the youth.