“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.”
Hellbound and Down 