'Ghost students' are haunting WA community colleges — to steal financial aid

Last spring, the art instructors at Green River College in Auburn were excited. Their upcoming summer classes were far more popular than usual — some were already at capacity.

“Summer quarter is typically lower enrolled, right? And so we're like, 'Hey, wait a minute. This is really cool,'" said instructor Paul Metivier, who chairs the school's fine arts division. Teachers' enthusiasm soon turned to fright, however, when they learned that fraudsters were flooding the college with fictional students.

The registrar’s office started deleting them as fast as they could, Metivier said.

"But what would happen is then, they would backfill right in,” he said.

That meant classes looked full, so real students couldn’t enroll. That costs community colleges, many of which are already financially strapped.

Green River scared off most, but not all, of its phantom students in time for the start of summer quarter, Metivier said. When exam time came in his art appreciation class, “I noticed immediately there were like four or five students that completed the exam in one minute, and usually it takes 45 minutes to over an hour.”

Those students had all logged in at the same time and gotten the same questions wrong.

“And I began to realize, as I was reporting these students to the registrar, that likely it was one entity taking these classes," Metivier said.

Even worse, undetected “ghost students” have been spiriting away federal loans and grants. At South Puget Sound Community College, in Olympia, Enrollment Director Roosevelt Mendez said they’ve confirmed about three dozen phantom students they didn’t identify in time.

“In financial aid, that amounts to over $100,000 that's walked out our door," Mendez said, adding that he's sure there are more losses they don’t know about.

The State Board of Community and Technical Colleges says schools are required to report known financial aid fraud, but they don’t have good numbers on how often it’s happening because schools don’t always detect it.

Mendez is part of their state work group focused on ghostbusting. He said the problem began after the Covid pandemic, when many schools started letting students apply entirely online and not meet with a counselor.

"A lot of the reasons that community colleges are being targeted with fraudulent applications and ghost students is because of our access mission," said Karl Smith, vice president of student affairs at Tacoma Community College.

"We've tried to make it easier for first generation students to apply, and adult learners to come back to college," Smith said, by lowering barriers like doing away with an application fee. "We've done some things in their best interest that fraudsters have taken advantage of."

At many community and technical colleges, crooks can now use stolen Social Security numbers to sign up for classes — and financial aid — without ever showing their face on campus. That can leave victims of identity theft on the hook to pay back the loans.

Now colleges are looking at whether to bring some barriers back, like requiring video meetings with applicants to check their IDs.

In the meantime, some schools, like Green River College, are hiring staff entirely focused on detecting fraud, like verifying that student addresses are not just vacant buildings. They are also looking for trends, like classes at the beginning of the alphabet filling up the fastest.

Mendez said everyone in the enrollment department at South Puget Sound Community College is now trained in fraud detection.

“You know, I didn't think that being the director of enrollment or registrar at a college would bring me to being a private investigator, but that's kind of what I've become a little bit," he said.

At schools statewide, instructors are being told to look for students who never show up to class or engage online — and drop them.

Now, Mendez said, some fraudsters are getting wise.

"They realize, 'Hey, I've got to complete some coursework for them to give me the money,'" he said. "So they're using AI to complete this coursework at a rapid pace.”

Mendez said community colleges need help — and quickly. They’re seeing fraudsters use AI to submit 30 applications to different schools within minutes. But detecting and deleting ghost students is still a manual process.

“As the fraudsters get smarter, we're getting left behind," Mendez said.

He said colleges are going to need AI solutions to this AI-driven problem.