Zoom School and Illegal Aliens Made Community College a Giant Fraud Machine
1 in 5 community college applications in California are from ‘ghost students’
By Daniel Greenfield
When the government starts throwing a bunch of money at something, the fraudsters arrive. The various pandemic bailouts may have amounted to the largest single case of fraud in American history. And much of that money was stolen and diverted by foreign scammers making it a mass robbery of Americans.
The government is throwing money at community colleges? Guess what’s happening.
Today, about 20% of California’s community college applications are scams: more than 460,000 of the 2.3 million requests to the state’s online application system since July alone, says the state Chancellor’s Office, which oversees the 116 campuses. Community colleges are required to accept any student in the state with a high school diploma, and a Social Security number is not required to apply.
The system’s screening software blocked just half of the fraudsters, while the rest slipped through to try to enroll in online classes, then use their bogus student status to seek financial aid — at which point they must provide valid identification.
Enrollment fraud surged during the COVID crisis, alongside new opportunities for anyone in possession of a stolen identity and a criminal mind. Students no longer had to show up in person, and often still don’t.
Combine remote learning and pandering to illegal aliens by not requiring IDs, and community college turned into scam city.
A whole lot of the billions that the government has put into community colleges is being stolen and, once again, by foreign scammers.
I’ve been hearing about the situation from educators, but this is the first time I’ve seen hard numbers that show the scale of the problem.
Professors meanwhile routinely experience a situation where half of their classes consist of bots that never turn on their cameras.
Colleges have some financial incentive to stop the scams, but even more incentive to keep them going. Few students are returning to classrooms and the ghost students provide numbers that suggest, contrary to anecdotal evidence, that enrollment is growing, at least virtually, which it actually is not.
How much of higher education is a scam?
Let me close with a brief anecdote.
Students are using ChatGPT to write essays and professors are using ChatGPT to grade them.
And the taxpayers sadly can’t use ChatGPT to pay for the whole thing.
https://www.raptureforums.com/polit...made-community-college-a-giant-fraud-machine/
1 in 5 community college applications in California are from ‘ghost students’
By Daniel Greenfield
When the government starts throwing a bunch of money at something, the fraudsters arrive. The various pandemic bailouts may have amounted to the largest single case of fraud in American history. And much of that money was stolen and diverted by foreign scammers making it a mass robbery of Americans.
The government is throwing money at community colleges? Guess what’s happening.
Today, about 20% of California’s community college applications are scams: more than 460,000 of the 2.3 million requests to the state’s online application system since July alone, says the state Chancellor’s Office, which oversees the 116 campuses. Community colleges are required to accept any student in the state with a high school diploma, and a Social Security number is not required to apply.
The system’s screening software blocked just half of the fraudsters, while the rest slipped through to try to enroll in online classes, then use their bogus student status to seek financial aid — at which point they must provide valid identification.
Enrollment fraud surged during the COVID crisis, alongside new opportunities for anyone in possession of a stolen identity and a criminal mind. Students no longer had to show up in person, and often still don’t.
Combine remote learning and pandering to illegal aliens by not requiring IDs, and community college turned into scam city.
A whole lot of the billions that the government has put into community colleges is being stolen and, once again, by foreign scammers.
I’ve been hearing about the situation from educators, but this is the first time I’ve seen hard numbers that show the scale of the problem.
Professors meanwhile routinely experience a situation where half of their classes consist of bots that never turn on their cameras.
Colleges have some financial incentive to stop the scams, but even more incentive to keep them going. Few students are returning to classrooms and the ghost students provide numbers that suggest, contrary to anecdotal evidence, that enrollment is growing, at least virtually, which it actually is not.
How much of higher education is a scam?
Let me close with a brief anecdote.
Students are using ChatGPT to write essays and professors are using ChatGPT to grade them.
And the taxpayers sadly can’t use ChatGPT to pay for the whole thing.
https://www.raptureforums.com/polit...made-community-college-a-giant-fraud-machine/