Fake students using aliases, enrolling in community college courses, and submitting AI-generated assignments are scamming the system out of millions in state and federal financial aid. Colleges across the country are struggling to keep up.
A recent investigative report by Voice of San Diego, a nonprofit news outlet, reveals that the rise of “bot” students has become a major challenge for community colleges nationwide.
California has been hit particularly hard. According to the state chancellor’s office, an estimated 25% of community college applicants in the state last year were bots—non-human accounts created to exploit the system.
One striking example comes from Southwestern College, where professor Elizabeth Smith noticed something unusual: all her online classes were full at the start of the semester. After a thorough review, she cut her roster from 104 students down to just 15. The rest, she discovered, were fake.
The surge in online classes—accelerated by the pandemic—has created the perfect environment for scammers. By simply staying enrolled long enough to receive aid disbursements, fraudsters can collect funds without ever participating in class. Because community colleges are open-access and accept all applicants, they’re especially vulnerable to these schemes. Faculty members are left with the burden of investigating fraud on top of their teaching duties, Voice of San Diego reports.
The problem isn’t going away anytime soon. In 2024 alone, fake students at California community colleges siphoned off over $11 million in financial aid—more than twice the amount lost to fraud the previous year.
While some fake students don’t turn in any work and hope to slip through unnoticed, others use AI tools to generate assignments. For instructors without training in AI detection, distinguishing between genuine student work, AI output, and traditional plagiarism can be incredibly difficult.
To put it in perspective, the $11 million lost to fraud represents a small fraction of the total aid distributed—about $1.7 billion in federal and $1.5 billion in state aid to California community college students last year. Still, the issue frustrates educators who must spend valuable time verifying student legitimacy, while genuine students are often shut out of courses because fake enrollees take up space.