City College of San Francisco is racing against the clock to stop scammers from interfering with students enrolling in its courses.
About 10,000 so-called “ghost students” — fake student accounts operated by high-tech fraudsters — registered for classes this spring to steal financial aid disbursements. The previous semester had about half that many.
What’s more, the California Community College system had 956,935 suspected fraudulent applications last year, incurring an overall financial aid loss of almost $10.3 million according to one media report.
City College’s administration is working to solve the issue, activating a task force to curb the fraudulent enrollments, and recently appointed a new chief technology officer who will work on the issue.
But the state of affairs has the college’s teachers’ union calling for solutions to ensure enrollment can grow as students struggle to get into classes. With summer and fall registration starting in mid April, the pressure is on to get rid of the ghosts.
Megan Sweeney, a political science professor and faculty union American Federation of Teachers 2121 board member, said the situation “isn’t a failing on CCSF’s part.” She and many other faculty members believe ghost students are involved with sophisticated crime rings.
“City College just needs the state chancellor [Sonya Christian] to step up and help solve the issue,” Sweeney said. “They are ahead of us in terms of the resources they have, and there’s a huge incentive for them to get into classes.”
The California Community Colleges Chancellor's office did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
“It’s important to demand urgency, to put more resources into solving it by next semester,” Sweeney said. “Part of it definitely needs to be from the state chancellor’s office or have the FBI’s investigation.”
Interim Chancellor Mitchell Bailey likewise described ghost students as a statewide criminal predicament operating with wit, anonymity and significant resources. He thanked all faculty “who continue to review and scrub and rescrub lists.”
“The college is working on a portfolio of policy, process and technological enhancements that will be aimed at lessening the manual review of the current process and achieve greater accuracy in preventing bad actors from getting to the point of enrolling,” Bailey told The Light in a statement.
Good Students Vs. Bad Actors
At the beginning of the year, mass emails from the college administration were sent out to confirm increased faculty vigilance and implementation of stricter verification procedures.
When gender studies student Victoria Solis first read the email, she didn’t give it much thought until she realized ghost students prevented real people from enrolling.
Solis is a member of City DREAM, a resource center that helps undocumented or mixed-status students navigate community college.
“The most affected students are first-time students who don’t have EOPS [Extended Opportunity Programs and Services] or priority registration,” Solis said. “I feel very disappointed when students cannot complete registration because of these technical difficulties.”
Detecting and removing ghost students from class rosters takes up considerable faculty time and thwarts genuine learners from registering for competitive courses amid ongoing class shortages.
“I spent over 40 hours on this issue starting in [last] December, after there were larger than usual numbers of suspected fraudulent accounts taking spots from actual students in our classes for spring,” Academic Senate Executive Council Vice President Lillian Marrujo-Duck said.
Marrujo-Duck, a history professor who teaches online, noted that she dropped over 24% of her roster eight days into the semester because those accounts had no discernible activity.
This increased percentage compared to prior years made her efforts as a supportive teacher harder, as someone who emails welcome letters to her students before official instruction.
Once no-shows were dropped, Marrujo-Duck still had more than 230 add requests to examine — a responsibility she felt should not include “taking on organized crime.”
“When it takes two or three weeks to sort out add requests, that is a distraction to the teaching process,” Marrujo-Duck said. “In the end, I do not know if my efforts are 100% successful in making sure every legitimate student found a spot.”
Instructors lose unpaid hours policing rosters, and students lose spaces so long as suspected bad actors complicate the big picture.
Photojournalism student Kyra Young couldn’t register in two journalism classes due to how quickly — and questionably — those classes reached capacity.
“I just knew that it was not realistic at all,” Young said. “I was also looking at taking a photography course, and ghost students made securing the optimal time I was looking at fairly difficult, to the point where I’m not taking it right now.”
Of the seven students The Ingleside Light interviewed about ghost students, two didn’t recognize what ghost students were and five, Young included, understood the impact.
“Getting out of Covid, it felt like at least two out of every three classes had ghost students,” dual environmental science and mathematics major Isaac Boss said. “I was mistaken for a ghost student in my online environmental science class last year.”
Boss empathized with fellow students. Every section seemingly had no open wait lists, especially English classes necessary for graduation.
“Before, I didn’t notice ghost students as a big problem, but this semester I noticed how full everything was,” Boss said. “I talked to a lot of people in the Student Success Center to better understand, and they expressed their difficulties. It’s caused a lot of stress.”
Nancy Chan is a former healthcare employee circling back to doing what she loves — writing. She has a bachelor's degree in journalism from Sacramento State University.
