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Key Takeaways
- California community colleges are losing millions in financial aid to 'ghost students,' with estimates suggesting over $1 billion could be fraudulent, according to a report.
- Professor Kim Rich from Pierce College estimates that as many as half of her students may be fake, highlighting persistent challenges in detecting and preventing this fraud.
- Despite attempts to implement new ID verification measures and spending millions on fraud prevention, many educators, including Rich, feel little progress has been made.
“Ghost students” continue to steal millions in financial aid from the California Community College System despite efforts to stop them, a new report finds.
While Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said there is $1 billion in fraudulent financial aid paid out to the scammers, who might use bots to enroll and participate in class, the number is likely much larger according to a professor interviewed by Open the Books and The College Fix.
Kim Rich, a criminal justice professor at Pierce College, said she determined half of the students in her classes are fake.
Rich told The Fix that she has tried “to stop this fraud in its tracks for the past four years,” but she doesn’t “feel like [she’s] anywhere closer.” She previously spoke to The Fix in 2022 after determining about 36 percent of the students of newly-issued student ids were fake just from one week period at her college. She regularly comments on the problem of fake students.
In the spring 2025 semester, according to the Open the Books report, 24 students in Rich’s 40-student class were fake. Rich estimated that if just one ‘ghost student’ were enrolled in each of the 4,000 online classes offered in Los Angeles community colleges per semester, the nine schools in the county would lose a combined $20 million per semester.
Referencing the expected ID verification mandate the chancellor’s office planned to implement on Oct. 30 Rich told The Fix that she is “not very confident it will solve the problem or even reduce the instances of financial aid fraud, mainly because none of the other efforts or millions of dollars they have spent to remedy this issue have.”
“The criminals are ten steps ahead. The CCCCO, districts and colleges have had four years and millions of dollars to fix this and they still haven’t. There is no accountability,” Rich said.
The fraud “continues four years later and there is no end in sight despite what the CA Community College Chancellor’s Office and individual colleges and districts might state,” Rich said.
“It’s ironic,” she said, “that in less than 30 seconds I can identify a fraudulent student in my class when millions of dollars being spent on programs to identify and prevent it from occurring can’t.”
“In California we have Silicon Valley, the heart of tech innovation, and there is not one person, not just there, but across the entire nation that cannot fix this problem,” the professor told The Fix. “That leads me to believe there are people in positions of power that do not want it fixed.”
The community college system said it is “leveraging AI to enhance fraud prevention and detection, using a tool called LightLeap AI.
Chris Ferguson, an executive vice chancellor with the California Community College system, said he is “not in a position to validate or comment on another outlet’s reporting or methodology,” when asked for comment on Open the Book’s conclusions.
The watchdog group is optimistic that “Secretary McMahon is taking it seriously.”
“This is a theft twice over, not only are taxpayers being ripped off, but students who are trying to get seats in classes and financial aid are locked out of opportunities by these fraudsters,” Open the Books told The Fix via email.
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