Feed: Slashdot
Feed Link: https://slashdot.org/
---

Title: Ghost Students Are Creating an 'Agonizing' Problem For California
Colleges

Link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/05/08/0122...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from SFGATE: When the pandemic upended
the world of higher education, Robin Pugh, a professor at City College of San
Francisco, began to see one puzzling problem in her online courses: Not
everyone was a real student. Of the 40 students enrolled in her popular
introduction to real estate course, Pugh said she'd normally drop three to
five from her roster who don't start the course or make contact with her at
the start of the semester. But during the current spring semester, Pugh said
that number more than doubled when she had to cut 11 students. It's a strange
new reality that has left her baffled. "It's really unclear to me, and beyond
the scope of my knowledge, how this is really happening," she said. "Is it
organized crime? Is it something else? Everybody has lots of theories." Some
of the disengaged students in Pugh's courses are what administrators and
cybersecurity experts say are "ghost students," and they've been a growing
problem for community colleges, particularly since the shift to online
instruction during the pandemic. These "ghost students" are artificially
intelligent agents or bots that pose as real students in order to steal
millions of dollars of financial aid that could otherwise go to actual
humans. And as colleges grapple with the problem, Pugh and her colleagues
have been tasked with a new and "frustrating" task of weeding out these bots
and trying to decide who's a real person. The process, she said, takes her
focus off teaching the real students. "I am very intentional about having
individualized interaction with all of my students as early as possible,"
Pugh said. "That included making phone calls to people, sending email
messages, just a lot of reaching out individually to find out 'Are you just
overwhelmed at work and haven't gotten around to starting the class yet? Or
are you not a real person?'" Financial aid fraud is not new, but it's been on
the rise in California's community colleges, Cal Matters reported, with
scammers stealing more than $10 million in 2024, more than double the amount
in 2023. Wendy Brill-Wynkoop, the president of the Faculty Association of
California Community Colleges and a professor at College of the Canyons in
Santa Clarita, said the bots have been enrolling in courses since around
early 2021. "It's been going on for quite some time," she said. "I think the
reason that you're hearing more about it is that it's getting harder and
harder to combat or to deal with." A spokesperson for the California
Community Colleges Chancellor's Office estimates that 0.21% of the system's
financial aid was fraudulently disbursed. However, the office was unable to
estimate the percentage of fraudulent attempts attributed to bots.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

---
VRSS v2.1.180528