65k fake students enrolled in the California junior college system
openthebooks.substack.com
openthebooks.substack.com
https://pagesix.com/2021/06/28/tayshia-adams-and-more-bachel...
These covid programs were certainly a massive handout to the unscrupulous. I feel sorry for those who worked hard and lived frugally, just to get steamrolled by the government money printer.
And look how reluctant the Fed and Fiscal were to reign in any of the madness. 0 moves until 8% CPI. Can't have housing appreciate at 10% instead of 20%, or stocks at 10 instead of 30 now, can we?
Never seen a class of people so eager to take wealth/future prosperity from their children
These policies are in line with that, a unequivocal transfer of money from structured hard working families to unstructured broken ones. Removing incentives for the former and adding them for the latter.
It's very easy to destroy social fabric top down, but it can only be created bottom up.
How do you figure?
Notice less government is therefore the answer regardless of why we keep getting these outcomes.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/economics/08/governmen...
The next one looks like student loans which totals $1.61T nation wide.
The initial Covid packages were warranted, but the packages passed in December 2020 and March 2021 were largely unnecessary after the initial shock had passed and the velocity in the drop in unemployment was already strong. Or they may have been warranted at a much smaller magnitude with more discretion in who received benefits.
The consequence now is that the economy is so overstimulated, we basically have to force the recession we would have had anyway to prevent it from overheating. So we'll end up in the same place, but with a ton of extra debt to service
Since most of that 30% have low income and come from low income backgrounds it will be a struggle to get it passed. A shame as those are the ones that need it the most. It’s interesting to note that Social Security was designed to cover 100% of the population even though only a smaller segment needed it, specifically to make it harder to kill. For student debt that would be an impossible sum and unnecessary.
In case anyone is curious, please note the following excerpt from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_Act
> Job categories that were not covered by the act included workers in agricultural labor, domestic service, government employees, and many teachers, nurses, hospital employees, librarians, and social workers. As a result,
> > 65 percent of the African American workforce was excluded from the initial Social Security program (as well as 27 percent of white workers). Many of these workers were covered only later on, when Social Security was expanded in 1950 and then in 1954.
FDR’s racial attitudes (or perhaps rather lack of interest in the issue) is rarely discussed, so thanks for bringing that up as well.
Student debt problems are entirely self-inflicted. Students taking the loans made their own decisions. Social Security users have been paying for decades (not taking, as the student loan recipients were). Social Security users, especially those who have not yet started collecting, have worked decades to get their benefits back.
If students get their loans paid off before Social Security is fixed, it's a certain sign of corruption. (Votes for money.)
Use your votes to make government effective. Vote for politicians that pledge to fix Social Security.
Remember, older folks don't have time to remain in the labor force (unlike younger people, who will benefit from rising paychecks.) At the end of the spectrum, there is only what has been saved (which is reduced by inflation) and pensions, Social Security.
For example another poster recommends free or low-price state schools, instead of handing out mountains of freshly created money. One of those is incredibly inflationary, the other is not.
There is a lot wrong with our education system (including guaranteed infinite loans incentivizing high tuition prices -- a better system would be to just have some state schools be free, and like in Europe, more competitive. They would only be for people who really need them financially and have great potential academically). However, resetting student loans and letting the system continue is definitely NOT the solution.
> It literally hurts no one to forgive the loans
Also want to address this, because I feel like it's a common misconception, especially with Gen Z. It's basically an inflationary policy to forgive debts. So it does hurt anyone who is affected negatively by inflation, while certainly not being "fair" for the reason mentioned above (some responsible adults actually paid their debts and are penalized for that). We all make mistakes (such as taking out massive loans to go to acting school and having it not materialize), but consequences are the side effect of living in a consistent reality. If you make financial reality inconsistent by forgiving loans, you incentivize more of that bad behavior. Also note that most degree holders with student debt are not the lower class, but the middle and upper middle class. Student loan forgiveness is a handout for an educated class of people who are generally doing much better than the poorest in society.
But now that inflation is here and consumer sentiment is close to all time lows, the jig is up.
It's not a black/white situation of choosing between economic collapse or hyperinflation at all. And keep in mind there were 3-4 huge packages passed. It's not like this had to be done as a single rushed magnum opus bill, this is the consequence of many bills and executive actions passed over 2 years, coinciding with a Fed that had unilateral power to ease the brakes yet did nothing for 2 years.
I'm not really that familiar with legislative processes, but this seems ridiculous if it's true. Isn't it the job of the house to write bills? What else do they have to do? Why won't they get another shot?
I think it's just a lack of political will. Not from regular people, but from politicians. People love to point to a huge 1000+ page bill that didn't pass because the guys voted it down and say "oh well we can't have X because the other guys voted against it". If "your guys" are really interested in having X, why don't they just write another bill that contains the minimum language to enact it?
We should really reject these massive "omnibus" bills out of principle. No one even reads them! There's no reason we can't have simple, targeted legislation that is limited to exactly one topic.
There’s nothing wrong with doing that (people sensibly borrow to purchase and use assets all the time). And when people are in the middle of a crisis it’s appropriate to take action (even in a drought the fire brigade sprays water on a fire).
But it’s worth looking retrospectively to figure out how much to do next time, not to be absolutist about it one way or the other.
Perhaps its because I work on the backend side of businesses (specifically the tax part) and so I actually get to see the financial numbers, but I am aware of over ten thousand jobs in SoCal alone that were saved by the PPP bailout.
It's disturbing to see the vaguely sociopath comments on this thread by tech workers who were largely unaffected by COVID complaining about "interfering" with the markets and about "bailouts."
A lot of businesses were hit hard by COVID. For tens of thousands of businesses, the COVID PPP loans were the only source of revenue they had at a time when government restrictions (i.e., the lockdowns) were inhibiting their sources of revenue. (And guys, we were in a pandemic that killed millions worldwide. Even after the lockdowns ended, many people were scared to go out for months.)
And even with the PPP loans, many small businesses didn't survive the lockdowns. Margins are low in many industries. Not everything is tech where you can bumble along without profits or purpose for a decade surviving on fat VC money.
I have done some initial quantitative analysis on the raw survey responses, but not gone further, since you know, daily troubles. The small business situation is deeply changed in the last two years, and this is not over at all.
Agreed. Very Ugolino.
https://pagesix.com/2021/06/28/tayshia-adams-and-more-bachel...
If you had bothered to follow up on that, you would have learned that all of these Bachelor(ette) contestants employed other people and used the PPP loans to pay those salaries during the PPP period when their normal revenue streams were unavailable due to COVID restrictions (Tayisha Adams actually went into detail about how and why she used the loan in the linked article). Which was quite literally the point of the PPP loans.
But I get that critical thinking is hard when you have an ideological point to make and you just want to shit talk other people.
Guess what? A lot of tech companies also took out PPP loans. Former HC darling Mixpanel took PPP loans. As did Bird, and a number of dating apps. (https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/06/ppp-loans-to-tech-start-ups-...) Are we calling them unscrupulous too?
Much lower income thresholds should have been applied to stimulus checks. Student loan debt should not have been paused for high earners. Interest rates should not have been pegged at 0 while asset bubbles formed over all asset classes.
That's called rational and responsible policy.
Enforcement could have been retroactive to avoid delaying disbursement of funds. It's not hard to write sensible legislation, even under a time crunch.
And hardships come naturally to business all the time. It's not the government's role to save everybody in every situation. Companies that were financially irresponsible or poorly run should naturally fail when economic times get rough.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. We saved everybody just to end up with massive inflation which will require forcing the economy into recession anyway, defeating the entire purpose and impact of the stimulus.
Make no mistake, unemployment will spike in a big way as the Fed tightens, just as it has essentially every other time they had to tighten to curb inflation.
The aid was right, the magnitude was far overdone. It will be quite obvious to historians, though it's obvious even now.
While I wouldn’t say that the policy as implemented was optimal, I think it’s worth considering the conditions under which it was made.
Each policy like this needs to balance the efficiency of the program with its coverage of those who need help. As an example, giving money to everyone unconditionally would have ensured full coverage, but it might not be very efficient. However, each restriction added to make the aid more targeted risks excluding people who genuinely needed help (reducing coverage) and _also_ increases costs since now the restriction needs to be tested, there needs to be an enforcement apparatus for those who violate it, etc. This is an uncertain calculus.
Then there’s the political reality that policy is not created by a benevolent dictator but instead through compromise among many individual parties, each of which has their own agenda and priorities, some of whom are acting in bad faith. Each decision point leads to more debate (should this group be in or out? should this threshold be X or Y?) and hassle, while in the background there are people suffering right now. After some point, you have to give up and accept the imperfections just to get it done.
Finally, politics being what they are, no matter how effective, helpful, and efficient the program is, the government’s reward for shipping the aid package is that the opposition party will decry it as wasteful and unnecessary. Every flaw will be amplified as part of their overall political messaging, and armchair analysts with the full benefit of hindsight will critique every decision. I can’t imagine that provides great motivation to put a lot of effort into polishing and tweaking the policy into perfection.
All of this is not to say that we shouldn’t strive for better programs and government—we absolutely should—just that it is a tremendously difficult problem.
But I will say on one point (Companies that were financially irresponsible or poorly run should naturally fail when economic times get rough.) These companies ere struggling because the government shut everything nonessential down. The point of the PPP was to make up for that fact that the government, during a global pandemic that killed millions wouldn't let people go to work.
Next time you want to discuss the merits of the PPP, step outside of your tech bubble and think about what COVID was like for all of the non-tech companies whose functions can't be done from home.
Was it an all or nothing situation? No, not at all. So either you're being intentionally misleading, or lack critical thinking. The option in front of politicians wasn't do these bills in this exact form or nothing at all. Why act like it was? It's a false premise.
Is it due to a bias in trying to justify the inflationary result?
And you seem to lack understanding of the consequence of high inflation, which inevitably will be higher unemployment, hurting those you sought to help. Study any history of the relationship between monetary policy, inflation, and unemployment and it's pretty obvious.
Inflation is not a bad thing; in fact, low-to-moderate inflation is desired. High inflation is not because it generally means that base or fixed cost growth (i.e., food and oil) is outpacing productive growth (pretty much everything else).
The option in front of politicians wasn't do these bills in this exact form or nothing at all. Why act like it was? It's a false premise.
No it wasn't, but it was the best package they could put together, and it took months to get that far due to ideologues blocking better/more efficient options.
It's for armchair economists like you to debate the theoretical perfect relief package that they should have passed, in the non-existent fantasy la la land where that would have been possible. Of course, in that fantasy land, COVID wouldn't have happened, and our economy would not have become dependent on JIT inventory.
With FAFSA, the assistance is all encapsulated away from the student- you apply for an assistance loan (requires SSN), an account is created for you, the college is hooked up directly to that account, so you never actually handle the cash. How does this specific fraud actually work?
The reason these are ripe for fraud is that in many cases they were implemented as direct deposit transfers directly to registered students. They were implemented without checks or controls in order to get the money out ASAP, so anyone who registered as a student and entered the correct information to qualify could get one of those direct deposits.
As far as I can tell, some of the implementation details depended on the college. Scammers likely tried different colleges until they discovered a system that didn't verify anything (California Junior College System) and then started filling out forms to collect the direct deposits.
The fact that scammers are registering with obviously fake names like "Barack Obama" suggests that zero confirmations are being performed at all before this money is distributed.
That doesn't strike me as fake. I've met Osama Bin Laden, at least one of the many people in this world with that name. There are no doubt many people called Gene Simmons who might have issues setting up accounts. James Bond was named after an author of bird books. I bet his descendants still get laughs at school. I met a junior officer once, last name "Planet". Good luck keeping a straight face on parade as they get promoted to Captain.
Thanks for providing the additional details.
It’s not like Bezos will cash this cheque.
Our efforts to avoid accidentally helping a rich person via means testing cause for more damage to our ability to help poor and middle class people.
Just give everybody the same amount of cash and leave it at that! There are few enough rich people (almost by definition) that it won't save much to exclude them.
Of course he won't be doing anything so mundane personally, people like him will have teams whose job it is to squeeze every cent.
He actually was entitled to it. His earnings in 2011 were below $100,000. I'm all for keeping people honest, but let's not lie.
See, in 2010 he was worth $12.6 billion. In 2011 it was $18.1 billion. Then in 2012 went up to $23.2 billion. These figures apparently come from Forbes, who calculate this stuff.. see https://www.therichest.com/lifestyles/jeff-bezo-years-earned...
I guess he didn't "earn" that money though.. so would definitely have been entitled to a benefit for folk who don't earn so much? My bad...
The fact that the criteria for the payout was just income and not a combination of income and assets is the fault of the people writing the legislation.
Mostly it's people getting free .edu email address which allows discounts on software and other things. This is most of the 65K fake students.
Then there's the fraud, where students are paying people $ to take their classes to get the government $$$$ -
"However, Rich soon realized that all of the work being submitted by four students was clearly being completed by an individual who wasn’t a student in the class." https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_breakingnews/california-co...
This might be why middle names are missing. That data is unknown but the other data real.
I suspect they are wrong about the third type of external fraud, but not sure.
Then there's the fraud where the College gets benefits from student numbers so allows the spam.
This is how one section of the Danish educational system worked for years: Pointless, governmentally funded study programmes that don’t qualify for any kind of real-world work, but the school gets a yearly reward per student, and the students get a monthly deposit for being a student.
Or a more recent example, Afghanistan: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-59230564
Unfortunately, that type of thing seems to happen a lot in large bureaucracies for those same types of reasons, whether governments, big business or whatever, they want to sweep mistakes like that under the rug. Hopefully they plug the hole before doing that. One can hope.
Work authorization status also affects a number of things related to payroll. So it's not a trivial issue for one person, acting alone, to make up a bunch of fake employees. In order to get away with something like this in real life, there would have to have been someone else at the company in on the fraud (since, as you claim, it's a "BIG" company).
And since payroll is involved, you are looking at several federal and state felonies, which means its not the company's choice to file charges or not. Multiple state and federal agencies would pursue this even if the company did not.
This story would have been believable if you had said it was at a small startup without an HR department.
I have seen numerous examples of this over the years in both big companies and start ups. it happens.
wtf
And then more quotes back that up.
Just make people register on site. Still via computer but in person. Problem solved. This is community college where everyone is local.
Yet this is a perfect example of why that doesn’t work in practice. Fraudsters are drawn to systems without sufficient controls and they will exploit them mercilessly as long as they think they can get away with it.
Worse, aid is infinite and resources are limited. These fake students are blocking actual students from registering for classes and draining away the time of educators and administrators who should be busy running the school, not trying to separate out real and fake students.
Means testing is a dumb idea if we’re administering, for example, a $100 drug test before giving someone $100 in food stamps. However, when we’re handing out $5,000 or more then investing $100-$200 into means testing or manual verification should have been an obvious requirement.
EDIT: People seem to be misinterpreting this article. The aid in question came from the COVID-19 related HEERF funds and CARES act and was distributed directly to applicants. It did not count towards nor subtract from normal financial aid (FAFSA, etc.) meant to pay for the education. It was supposed to be money meant to help students survive outside of education in a faltering COVID economy. Financial aid for actual education would have gone straight to the school and therefore there's no reason for fraudsters to register to consume it.
This is money distributed to students (or fraudsters) via direct deposit. It's different than the aid you're familiar with from past college application experience.
In this case, it literally is going to the wrong people. These funds were designed to give students an extra financial boost during a faltering COVID economy (that didn't really happen) and the funds weren't infinite.
If fraudsters are showing up and claiming the money before actual students in need can get it, I don't understand how you think it's not a case of the aid going to the wrong people.
Again, this isn't tuition aid and it's not related to the cost of college. It was a stimulus/aid package targeted at people who were also students, but it was separate from tuition assistance or tuition financial aid.
> I don't really understand how this fraud happens- when I applied for FAFSA
Lawmakers rushed through a lot of new COVID-19 related aid bills and aid packages. Many of them were poorly thought out and implemented as quickly as possible, forgoing controls and verification to get them done ASAP.
The article specifically mentions COVID-19 related aid, which has been rife with fraud. It’s frustrating that some of these supposedly time-limited emergency aid packages continue to be handed out despite the booming economy and rampant inflation.
I can’t believe it was a mistake, especially when you have government bureaucrats who are doing the scam themselves for millions…
https://globalnews.ca/news/7600626/ontario-civil-servant-bet...
> The aid in question came from the COVID-19 related HEERF funds and CARES act and was distributed directly to applicants.
I clicked through to the LA Times article and it mentions at least hundreds of thousands of dollars.
However, I agree that low-cost state run colleges are a better strategy than free loans.
We are back to making qualifying for aid, welfare, etc. difficult so people who need it give up.
They got lax during Covid, but not today.
The historical point of Means Testing is to dissuade the people whom need it most from applying. Every Social Worker can go on for hours how the powers at be make qualifying for any help arduous.
It's never discussed publically, because outright fraud is easier to report on, and the average Joe has never dealt with the welfare system, except maybe in college.
I had to lie about living independent in order to qualify for anything other than a Pell grant, and a small federal loan. SOL is up, and I paid my later student loans off completely.
Similarly, I don't "support" the hospitals, right up until I get cancer and spend over a month in-patient receiving some very expensive therapies.
And I say that as a cyclist, but one that can see past the self-serving rationalization and manipulative nature of the freeloader argument.
And that doesn’t even address the deeply authoritarian and evil core of the argument of “well, I determine what’s best for you so I will force it on you against your will for your own good, because what I want/enjoy conveniently coincides with what is best for you”. It’s tyranny and a purely evil mindset.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-03-22/some-com...
I haven’t heard much of any America specific big time fraud in this area either. If any implication was this article. That doesn’t count since the article isn’t saying aid is happening unlike Sweden.
Just an example of truly inept leadership in multiple departments and at the top.
It's good that some measures are planned to help prevent the fraud, but it's frustrating how slow they are to get implemented.
This happens because our political systems have no incentives to prevent it from happening.
Suppose I'm running a tech company and a bunch of "users" are actually non-engaged, fake accounts. If my valuation is based at least in part on how many users I have, there is not a lot of incentive to go actively looking for, eliminating or preventing these fake accounts. I may even continue to believe that they are all real, engaged users and not even consider the alternative.
From the cases described in the article: Some people actually do have a given name as their family name and some even have the same name for both (I know a Peter Peter). Also some people only have a single name (consider the famous IBM Fellow Mohan, who types “C Mohan” when some system can’t deal with that case.
Straightening this out will be tedious and costly. I feel bad for the actual students who were unable to register.
- "“The school is leaving the fake students in,” she said. “The school is afraid if they admit the fraud, they’re on the hook for allowing the fraud and having to pay it back.”"
It's also possible administrators are the ones putting the fake students in. They're the ones in the easiest position to do this fraud.
Like in the Yale story from last month:
It's premature. There has to be a whole process.
That being said, college administrators are masters at dodging the courtroom, and keeping people out of the courtroom. I imagine they have some ideas how to do it for themselves as well.
Make them legally accountable.
Banks can’t assist fraudsters and then say “not my job.” The administrators should be jailed or lending to colleges with this problem should stop.
Banks can’t give out fake loans. They try to all the time and are rightfully regulated/fined/charged when they do.
Banks giving out bad loans caused the 2008 collapse. Student loans will one day cause a similar problem but it won’t be big banks going bankrupt, it will be us. Hearing that 20% are obvious fraud doesn’t even surprise anyone. Imagine a bank saying 20% of their loans are fraud but it’s “not their job” to check that loans are given to anonymous recipients who don’t bother to provide even a fake name!
It’s a crime. Like the banks, the people at the top are aware but profit off doing nothing. That they work for the taxpayers just makes it that much more criminal, not less!
This particular issue over the last year or so has gotten worse, with more eyeballs on it, once actual money became involved (before it was still an issue but on a smaller scale mostly for the free edu emails we tend to issue, along with other freebies that can help enable, such as free credits for Azure or other services).
Even in the previous cases, I was annoyed/upset because in my mind the first line of defense the colleges have is preventing these fake users from being able to submit an application successfully in the first place, since the OpenCCCApply application (which I believe is used by all ~115 CCCs) was allowing the submissions in the first place…and since we mostly bring that application data into the individual colleges, not many triggered a “hold” on our end.
Yes, CCCTechCenter (which helps manage the team which maintains the OpenCCCApply system) have done a few things over this past year that are mentioned in the article already (but based on the article I can’t tell 100% if it is really indicating the issue is still rampant in the more recent semesters…one of the changes was adding usage of an IP reputation checker in for example, but there are likely ways around that too for these folks who actually don’t seem to actually use bots…maybe they use actual people instead based on what I’ve seen, such as the YouTube video shared in the article).
What I found really annoying by it all is that while the problem originated from the systems being provided to the colleges from the state level (OpenCCCApply mainly), the individual colleges are now on the hook to gather a bunch of mostly useless data, and go on silly adventures such as investigating IP address info within our other systems (like Canvas) to help find or report the fraudulent activity.
I think I saw FAFSA mentioned a few times but I don’t think there is a ton of fraud coming from the FAFSA application too directly…but in this past year many of the colleges have been putting COVID relief funds they’ve received (to help get students/staff back on campus) and using those to pay for fees or provide an extra amount for books, etc. which isn’t something that will continue forever (in fact, I think for this summer this will already have ended, or it will be the last semester where it will be offered).
In most cases, once the incentive is taken away, or the bar to get it is made higher, these folks creating the fraudulent accounts will generally move on (or target schools that don’t implement some of the 2nd layer fixes at the college level…unfortunately while the CCCTechCenter tries its best, it doesn’t typically fully acknowledge its role in creating some of these situations, and I almost lol’ed when I saw towards the end of the article I saw they are looking to get more funding to “modernize” it, yet again, considering a lot of effort / time / money already has gone into creating the current OpenCCCApply system not that long ago from the previous system, which was pretty bad in comparison).
Overall though this particular situation is at the same both more complex and simpler than folks may think, once you have some more details (more complex because there is a lot about what’s going on in the CCCs the HN community isn’t aware of, along with super strict regulations that have to be followed within the individual Financial Aid departments at each school, otherwise they win not be able to provide federal aid monies to students if they weren’t doing so, making that avenue for fraud a lot more less likely than the scenario I shared above on how the COVID relief monies have been being used instead to provide an incentive to get students back in the classroom…along with the solution being simpler since we already have a central application process that should be the system that keeps these applications from ever reaching the individual colleges, but it fails in that regard…that along with removing the financial incentive currently present, should reduce the fraud levels considerably…although there are likely a few more complexities even I am unaware of…I would just appreciate it if the search for fraud wouldn’t get pushed onto the individual colleges in these situations where a system wide protection should have prevented the situations in the first place, mainly because it causes a ton on unneeded busy work at the colleges keeping IT System Analysts and other technical folks from focusing on other, probably more important, internal projects).
Excuse any typos…I wrote this small novel on my phone.
This leads to number of students still being a pretty big factor in the funding received for the year. From Administrators I would say if any are worth their salt, ignoring any sort of fraud would be a no-no so I’m hoping that’s not a common situation being observed. On the other hand, losing a substantial percentage of your current budget due to a loss of students can be pretty tragic for the staff working on the campus. Budget reserves can usually be dipped into for a period of time, but what most folks don’t know or realize is that compared to private businesses where the cost of employees may be only a fraction of what the business brings in profit, most CCCs are likely spending 80-90% of their budgets on salaries and benefits for their staff (in some cases the % may be more, in some cases it may be less). This makes it extremely difficult most of the time to weather a big loss in students because if budget reserves get expended, and student numbers don’t improve, that’ll mean some sort of layoff process…which also provides those employees with reinstatement rights too for a considerable period of time afterward).
You are making assumptions about the motivations of the system being of good faith. There is ample evidence and multiple proofs that such is not the case.
The same applies to the whole education funding scheme, including FAFSA. It’s essentially a money laundering scheme to support the financial enslavement of people through debt in order to participate and be conditioned as an alpha slave that is also locked into the system financially.
There is no incentive to lower the cost of “education”. The incentive is to lock you into having to pay off more and more tokens/currency that you get for doing favors for your masters. The only reason why the rulers are even just toying with the student loan debt forgiveness is because there’s a slave revolt brewing among certain segments of the body of slaves/serfs.
I am not at all one affected by any of what I said, so your dismissal only serves to further delude yourself and possibly misdirect others who are susceptible to your type of manipulation.
Also, I am not your daddy or teacher, stop trying to waste my time to provide the proofs you will simply dismiss, because you are too lazy to do the work yourself and discovering contradictory truths would require you to face that deep insecurity that drives you. Better keep believing you know best and are the smartest guy in the room.
You sound like a flat earth type, demanding I provide all the proofs you can easily find yourself, just to dismiss them out of hand because they don’t align with your self-image and preconceived notions.
I know. Its a strong mental cage you are in.
You made erroneous, ridiculous claims, and - when rightfully challenged - dismissed any doubts as "not my homework,"
Your trolling is demonstrably ineffective, that is why the assumption that you are a 22 year old 4channer has merits - you have the smell of 4chan, but none of the skill, much like the losers that still grace the place now.
If you were better at trolling, you would had been given more credit.
Society in general is probably designed to benefit the upper and upper middle class -- that doesn't strike me as a controversial idea. For example, see the following paper:
Class in the 21st century: Asset inflation and the new logic of inequality https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0308518X198736...
And here's a tweet from Andreessen on how the college system benefits the upper middle class: https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/1513553688060596225 (https://twitter.com/Mark_J_Perry/status/1513519643876540421)
I would expect that most of us here vaguely qualify as upper middle class. We probably attended competitive schools. Many of us benefited from the largesse of our boomer parents. And even if we're not making FAANG money, and even if we can't quite afford a home suitable for a family in the Bay Area, we probably have make somewhat comfortable incomes, relative to the rest of the population.
There is little room for fraud outside of blatant identity theft.
Please read what I wrote again. My theory is that you have some innate and subconscious bias that is so overwhelming that you leap to defense in an illogical and instinctual manner, regardless of anything else, kind of like a body guard may leap into action on a car backfiring. Is that about accurate?
This is a direct response to your obviously wrong explicit statement, that FAFSA has little checks against fraud, and implied that any SSN will get you through.
I linked the document backing up my direct claim to the contrary, that the only way to trick FAFSA is to actually assume another's identity, because the applicants SSN, DoB, and name, must all match.
School's are also liable for any lack of due diligence.
So read what you wrote, then what I wrote, then read the linked document, then read this:
I suspect your immediate reprehension to being outed as ignorant causes you to jump to ad hominem, externalizing your conscious, knowing attitude of being blatantly wrong, and too embarrassed to admit otherwise.
Is that accurate?
Please reply with specific facts and sources to further dismiss or deny any part of my statement, so I can further demonstrate how your ramblings are little more than utterances of an ignorant person, grasping for a conspiracy - where incompetence clearly suffices.
:)
Not to mention that even getting the aid in the first place requires filling out a FAFSA form-- difficult to provide fake tax returns-- and about 10% are randomly selected for verification as well.
At least I remember needing that info to register for university in another state.
A honeypot or a captcha would probably reduce the scale of the fraudulent sign-ups quite a lot.
Where's the vendor Xap in this?
Were they not obligated to deliver a application system resistant to obvious forms of fraud and abuse? I know they're primarily an Education software vendor but this seems especially poor.
The current system, now called “OpenCCCApply”, was mostly developed by a team from Unicon (https://www.unicon.net/), along with folks within the CCCTechCenter team of my memory /understanding is correct (I’m not sure if it’s managed jointly though, or if only a CCCTechCenter team mostly manages it now though since I never heard those types of details).
A redesign/modernization effort however sounds…expensive.
> But Rich believes that these colleges do fear enrollment drops if they remove the fake accounts.
> At her college, the institution is considered a medium college — more than 10,000 students but less than 20,000 — but if it loses students, it will be considered a small college — less than 10,000 students — and lose funding down the road, the interim VP of academic affairs recently told instructors and administrators.
We need to change the laws to give any taxpayer standing to sue when they see taxpayer money being misappropriated.
Unfortunately the dominant party also benefits from all of this fraud, so it is ultimately a political problem. Until there is viable outside political competition, there will continue to be zero accountability and wide scale fraud and corruption. User count = money = political power/voters. Mainstream candidates are owned, and so the only solution involves draining the swamp so to speak and it’s pretty clear at this point, the swamp usually wins.
If you did that, then any government aid program would spend all their time and money fending off frivolous lawsuits instead of providing aid to those who need it. Though maybe that’s the intended outcome
Phantom students are not common at all - anything with a name like "Open the Books" sounds like a lobby group, and one would like about their motives and funding sources.
Is it perfectly effective? No, but it stops a massive chunk of otherwise easy-to-execute fraud.
My local community college woke up their sleepy 15 unit cop squad, and worked with financial aid, in order to prosecute a few people doing it. (A sleepy community college with 15 cops/detectives. There's a state law requiring cops per student ratio regardless of crime which is basically zero. They don't do anything besides ticket cars.)
This is what we pay our police to investigate.
The couple in Marin County signed up for classes, and got federal aid. They told their friends and it was a popular way to make a few grand, but their public outing stopped the scam. They always showed up to the first class though.
Poor people will do sketch chit in order to get ahead. Rich people cheat better, in greater numbers, but don't get caught. (According to professor Cartman. "You know how white people get ahead? They cheat, but they call it, I miss interpreted the ruuules. I'm looking at you Covid business fraudsters, or moral fraudsters.)
reaping and sowing springs to mind