On Friday, the U.S. Department of Education announced that starting this fall, applicants for federal Pell Grants will have to show up in person or appear on a live video with an "institutionally authorized individual" to provide "unexpired, valid, government-issued photo identification."
The department cited California in particular, where fraudbots have siphoned off $10 million of Pell Grants and $3 million in state Cal Grant student aid since last year.
California college officials voted last month to implement "robust identity verification protocols" at their CCCapply application portal, where 2 million students a year — including many fraudbots — first enter the state's community college system.
"I think that's great," said Kim Rich, a criminal justice instructor at L.A. Pierce College near Los Angeles. She has become an expert at identifying fraudbots and says she typically clears out three-quarters of the students — most of them bots — that enroll in her classes each term. Once they register, the bots can generate financial aid applications and disappear when the money arrives.
Before any student applies to the system or enrolls in a class, Rich said, "you verify their identity. Period. End of story. It's simple."
And, yet, making sure each student is a student is anything but simple these days.
That basic expectation became harder for college systems and the federal government to confirm after 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic led to an explosion of distance-learning classes, mainly at community colleges that are open to all. Remote classes and lax verification protocols have made it far easier for criminals to impersonate students than in previous years, and then to disappear when the financial aid checks land in the mailbox.
Despite the new pronouncements about a return to individual identification for state and federal financial aid, neither the U.S. of Education nor the California Community College Chancellor's Office specified how that would be achieved.
Implementation difficulties became apparent at the May 21 meeting of the California Community College Board of Governors, where members debated the fraud crisis for more than three hours, ultimately agreeing to generally upgrade the CCCApply technology to try to screen out more fraudulent applications, and to generally enhance applicant identification.
Love Adu, a member of the Board of Governors and an incoming junior at UC Berkeley, noted that colleges often used the identity verification software ID Me, but it excludes many kinds of students, including those who are incarcerated, undocumented, homeless or under 18. The last category includes high school students who simultaneously enroll in community college through the increasingly popular practice of dual enrollment.
"I experienced this personally and had to drive more than five hours to a college to identify myself in person because I didn't qualify for ID Me," Adu said at the meeting. "I had the means to do that — but I know that most students do not."
Adu urged her colleagues on the board to consider that when they eventually do hash out the specifics of how to check whether students are human.
The board spent most of the meeting debating whether the state chancellor's office should be given the authority to ask the state Legislature for permission to impose a fee of, say, $10 on applicants to help authenticate them.
Although the board eventually gave them that authority, students and faculty who spoke at the meeting said a fee would probably discourage many low-income students from enrolling and might not serve its intended purpose in any case.
Instead, most speakers said they would prefer to figure out how to verify real students.
"I think we can all agree that we can no longer minimize the effects of this problem. Something must be done," Eleni Gastis, president-elect of the faculty senate at Laney College in Oakland, told the board members before imploring them to "find other strategies to mitigate fraud before we ask our students to pony up."
She is among the instructors and staff members up and down the state who are forced to spend increasing amounts of time trying to identify and disenroll fake students before they can collect financial aid. Instructors report there are so many bots that there is often no room for real students.
"It takes faculty hours of time that they could be spending supporting our students," state Chancellor Sonya Christian said at the meeting. "It takes our classified staff hours of time to support students that they don't have."
Statewide, security software detected and thwarted fraud in 31.4 percent of applications this year, up from 20 percent in 2023, Chris Ferguson, head of finance at the state chancellor's office,
"We needed a plan yesterday," Gastis told the Chronicle on Friday. And when a plan is created, she said, it will have to be made clear to students and be fair to "marginalized and fearful communities."
After Friday's announcement from the feds, even officials at the state chancellor's office said they weren't sure what to do next.
The office is "waiting for additional guidance," a spokesperson for the chancellor's office told the Chronicle.
Even then, it might be a while before a plan is in place.
Once guidance arrives, the spokesperson said, "we will consult with our community college stakeholders to determine what processes and procedures will be needed to comply."
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