Community colleges first started seeing bots managed by fraud rings invade classes around 2021. Those bots seem to generally be real people managing networks of fake student aliases. The more they manage, the more financial aid money they can potentially steal.
Four years later, there are no clear signs it’s slowing down. During 2024 alone, fraudulent students at California community colleges swindled more than $11 million in state and federal financial aid dollars — more than double what was stolen the year prior.
Last year, the state chancellor’s office estimated 25 percent of community college applicants were bots.
Despite the eye-popping sum, state leaders are quick to point out that amounts to a fraction of the around $3.2 billion combined state and federal financial aid disbursed last year. But for many community college teachers, particularly those who teach online courses, the influx of bot students has changed what it means to be a teacher, said Eric Maag, who has taught at Southwestern for 21 years.
“We didn’t use to have to decide if our students were human, they were all people. But now there’s this skepticism because a growing number of the people we’re teaching are not real. We’re having to have these conversations with students, like, ‘Are you real? Is your work real?’” Maag said. “It’s really complicated, the relationship between the teacher and the student in almost like a fundamental way.”
Those teacher-led investigations have become more difficult over the years, professors say. While some bots simply don’t submit classwork and hope they can skate by, they also frequently use AI programs to generate classwork that they then submit. Determining whether a student is a bot can be a confusing task. After all, even real students use AI to do some good old-fashioned cheating in classes.
That mad bot-powered dash for enrollment has left some students unable to register for the classes they need. It has also given rise to a sort of whisper network, where professors recommend students reference them by name when trying to get added to other classes.
Kevin Alston, a business professor who has taught at Southwestern for nearly 20 years, has stumbled across even more troubling incidents. During a prior semester, he actually called some of the students who were enrolled in his classes but had not submitted any classwork.
“One student said ‘I’m not in your class. I’m not even in the state of California anymore’” Alston recalled.
The student told him they had been enrolled in his class two years ago but had since moved on to a four-year university out of state.
“I said, ‘Oh, then the robots have grabbed your student ID and your name and re-enrolled you at Southwestern College. Now they’re collecting financial aid under your name,’” Alston said.
The California Community College system has put more resources toward detecting fraudulent students, partnering with a handful of tech companies, like ID.me to authenticate students. But that still hasn’t stopped the bots. As of March, scammers had already swindled nearly $4 million in federal and state financial aid.
As ‘Bot’ Students Continue to Flood In, Community Colleges Struggle to Respond