When the pandemic upended the world of higher education, Robin Pugh, a professor at City College of San Francisco, began to see one puzzling problem in her online courses: Not everyone was a real student. 

Of the 40 students enrolled in her popular introduction to real estate course, Pugh said she’d normally drop three to five from her roster who don’t start the course or make contact with her at the start of the semester. But during the current spring semester, Pugh said that number more than doubled when she had to cut 11 students. It’s a strange new reality that has left her baffled.

Susan Akana, City College of San Francisco professor of biology, walks into the Science Hall at City College of San Francisco Ocean Campus on Nov. 16, 2015, in San Francisco.

“It’s really unclear to me, and beyond the scope of my knowledge, how this is really happening,” she said. “Is it organized crime? Is it something else? Everybody has lots of theories.”

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Some of the disengaged students in Pugh’s courses are what administrators and cybersecurity experts say are “ghost students,” and they’ve been a growing problem for community colleges, particularly since the shift to online instruction during the pandemic. These “ghost students” are artificially intelligent agents or bots that pose as real students in order to steal millions of dollars of financial aid that could otherwise go to actual humans. And as colleges grapple with the problem, Pugh and her colleagues have been tasked with a new and “frustrating” task of weeding out these bots and trying to decide who’s a real person. 

The process, she said, takes her focus off teaching the real students.

“I am very intentional about having individualized interaction with all of my students as early as possible,” Pugh said. “That included making phone calls to people, sending email messages, just a lot of reaching out individually to find out ‘Are you just overwhelmed at work and haven’t gotten around to starting the class yet? Or are you not a real person?’”

Financial aid fraud is not new, but it’s been on the rise in California’s community colleges, Cal Matters reported, with scammers stealing more than $10 million in 2024, more than double the amount in 2023. 

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A spokesperson for the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office directed SFGATE to a Public Records Request Act request to obtain the exact numbers. However, the office estimates that 0.21% of the system’s financial aid was fraudulently disbursed, the spokesperson said. The chancellor’s office was unable to estimate the percentage of fraudulent attempts attributed to bots. 

“Bots don’t act on their own, there is almost always a human behind it,” the spokesperson said in an email.

An exterior view of College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita, Calif.

Wendy Brill-Wynkoop, the........

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