California colleges are striking back against a rising scourge fueled by artificial intelligence: so-called “ghost,” or synthetic, students.
The ghost students are fake or stolen identities wielded by scammers who flood colleges with thousands of applications in minutes, gain fast acceptance as students, request financial aid, and then disappear with the money. Some even submit homework to keep from being booted from class before they can collect. The Department of Education issued an advisory in the spring for colleges to be on high alert for fraudulent students, who not only steal financial aid but also take up so much space in classes that real students can’t get into the courses they need to graduate. The DOE revealed last month it found 150,000 suspect identities in federal student aid forms, and said $90 million had gone out to ineligible students. It traced $30 million in aid given to dead people whose identities were used to enroll in classes.
After being hit hard in 2024 by ghost students, the California Community College (CCC) system started fighting the AI-driven scheme—with AI. This month, the CCC launched an enterprise-wide AI initiative, using N2N’s LightLeap.AI platform to detect fraudulent enrollments. Since the rollout, which is still in the process of taking effect across all 116 colleges, 79,016 total applications have been detected as fraudulent across more than half a million applications, according to a recent update.
