Maybe a quick temporary fix would be to add a reCAPTCHA, and a better fix would be to mandate appearing on campus and verifying your identity before any accounts or financial aid is made available?
> 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.