Students aren't able to get into classes when bots are taking all the spots. Teachers actually care about educating students so they don't want to have their time wasted by bots. There's only so much loan money to go around and the schools want to get that cash into their own pockets, but the schools don't get any when scammers are running off with it to funnel money to other countries or whatever else they're doing. Similarly, students who really need the help can't get it when it all goes to someone who isn't interested in paying for education.

Schools have another problem with "ghost students" in general which is that there's a lot of other stuff going on at schools that depend on real students being there. Vendors, club activities, sporting/social events, nearby bars and restaurants etc. There's an entire ecosystem on and around campus which is created or supported by real students. All that non-classroom stuff helps make the school more attractive to students and often directly generates income for the school as well, but little of it would exist or be worthwhile if the campus is a ghost town.

When I was at community college (~ 2000), if the section you wanted was full at registration, you'd register in another section (in case), but show up at the section you wanted and talk with the instructor. Depending on the course/instructor, you'd might need to show up for the first week and anybody who hadn't attended in the first week would be dropped and those who had attended but weren't registered could take those spaces. Sometimes the instructor would do that at the first meeting. You'd go to the section you were registered in as well, and let the instructor know there (sometimes it'd be the same instructor and then maybe you wouldn't need to attend both sections). Not ideal, but registration order was based on completed credits, and after one semester it got a lot easier to get into the sections you wanted; students (real or not) that haven't completed any classes get to pick sections last, so once you've shown you're willing and able to complete classes, you're good. (Protip: check if taking any class in the summer will help you get into the sections you want in the fall)

At that time, you could drop classes in the first two weeks for a full refund.

That works pretty well for a full-time student, but two points...

- If you're working/raising a kid/whatever, you don't necessarily have the time to drop into classes that might be full. There is likely a non-zero number of people who see their preferred section is full and don't move beyond that (people taking one-off classes, or slowly working through a professional certificate).

- That's a lot of extra mental bandwidth for all involved. Yeah, it works, but life would be better if it wasn't the norm.

If you don’t have time to go to the class, you don’t have time to go to the class.

Probably the next step for online-only courses is for the ghost student to start submitting AI generated homework....

Whose money do you think is being sent to scammers?

Also, decent human beings care about things that are unjust/immoral/unethical regardless if it affects them or not.

> Whose money do you think is being sent to scammers?

I guess the tax payers money? Otherwise they would have nipped this in the bud.

> Also, decent human beings care about things that are unjust/immoral/unethical regardless if it affects them or not.

Decent people are sometimes quite far between, most people would never lift a finger even an inch if they don't have anything to gain personally.

> most people would never lift a finger even an inch if they don't have anything to gain personally.

Personally, I haven't found that to be the case. If you've got sources that say otherwise I'd be interested in seeing them.

The other day I was listening to music on the radio, and they were singing "I'm walking on sunshine". I was almost starting to enjoy the song, until I remembered "Hey! Does she actually have a source that verifies that she is walking on sunshine?"

Because I've been on the Internet for 25 years to always reply to commenters asking if they have verified sources for their claims. If they don't, that counts as another victory for me, and I can go to bed knowing I was right yet again.

I didn't ask seeking victory, I just want to know the truth. It's a valid question on the nature of people. Instead of feeling defeated, I'd have genuinely appreciated it if you'd responded with research that supported your position.

You're at least the second person today who I've asked for a source. I was surprised by what I learned the last time and I'm glad to have learned what I did.

You don't have to feel defeated for not having sources to back up your world view either. Maybe you've lived your life surrounded by terrible people who genuinely wouldn't help someone else more often than not. Maybe it's made you bitter and sarcastic. Maybe it's worth considering where that bias comes from and how well it actually applies to the world beyond your own experience. I asked because I think it usually is. After all, maybe I've just been really lucky and it turns out that people really are most often just selfish and unhelpful. I wouldn't consider being wrong about that a loss or failure on my part, but I would take learning something new to be a win.

Also, since you brought it up, I'm pretty sure I have fact checked a song at some point. Not that song, but I'd guess that I'm not the only one here who has at least once. Folks around here tend to be curious about stuff. Most of the time, requests for sources or more information shouldn't be interpreted as an attack.

It's only with life experience that you get a "source" for general ideas about life and people. The idea of a "source" for a world view of philosophical perspective is contradictory.

Those who will take action based on a moral conviction, which doesn't have any discernible benefit for themselves or for the people they care about, are few between. And fewer yet in the world of academia and distribution of public funds. I wouldn't make my original comment if the topic was about a different sector.

Make your own observations about people and you will come to your own conclusions. What I've seen is that people might be idealistic when they are young, but when they're old enough to actually make a real difference, then very few will keep any convictions instead of putting them on the shelf and focusing on personal benefit. I refer to actions which truly make a difference in day-to-day life. Not voting, putting your name on a list, protesting or such.

> Maybe you've lived your life surrounded by terrible people who genuinely wouldn't help someone else more often than not.

This doesn't really apply to the people we surround ourselves with, as we all choose to surround ourselves with those people who treat us well. And there's benefit in helping your friends and family. Now consider somebody the handling the benefits payments of people completely unknown to her, who are just names in a database.

Since you sincerely want to have a productive conversation, I would like to give two different reflections on humanity, they a little bit of two sides of the same coin.

One is that you should never judge yourself by how others judge you. But most people make this mistake. It's natural, since children grow up in some kind of stable "community". The problem with this is that most people do not have enough experience together with you to make any sort of judgement, it's usually mostly from gossip and prejudice. It leads to a lot of unnecessary frustration among the youth to have to struggle with this, and unlearning this usually only comes with experience of being an adult. Because once you get older you have already met and dealt with so many people in life that you know that how they treat you says nothing about you and everything about them as individuals.

The other reflection is a flip on the golden rule. "Treat others as you wish to be treated", but this doesn't cut it anymore in modern times because very many people see themselves merely as numbers for the government, so they want to be treated like shit by their superiors and want to treat those below them as shit.

I say instead "Treat others as if they are the best". Especially when employing young people I've used this rule. Meaning, I will treat them as if they are honest, hard-working, reliable and intelligent. Because they will then automatically behave that way. Usually nobody has ever treated them like that before, so they greatly enjoy it. I think it's completely subconscious, people will fall into a role, especially when they're young.

This is why schools and academia is so utterly destructive, because they baby young adults and hinder them from maturing and becoming the best that they can be. A lot of work places do this as well. How can you as an employer demand that your employees should be responsible and hard-working, if you make up rules and such that clearly shows that you don't think so?

Treating people as if they're the best also means that you really quickly can identify out those who are not up to it.

I have to stop now because I'm ranting, but it's all connected.

Now I'm even less inclined to take your anecdata seriously.

Please don't do this here.

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43919039 and marked it offtopic.

Yeah, you're right. I made a better reply down-thread that I had typed out yesterday.

Thanks!

Well, we’re focused on extracting as much money as possible from people who try to pay loans with awful terms. Meanwhile, the banks have no incentive to do meaningful vetting as the loans are guaranteed.

Like stealing money under threat of force from many individuals and handing it over to some random scammer?

That kind of immoral act? You might not be as decent a person as you might think.

Uh, federal financial aid is absolutely all of our money (acquired from taxes).

And loan fraud just drives up the cost of loans for everybody else.

And the overhead of fighting this eats into school resources, driving up the tuition that's forcing the loan in the first place.

And as a professor/instructor, that's money that could go to funding more tenured positions (vs adjunct spots or other "non-permanent" teachers).

So, sure, without putting much thought into it, an individual might not care. But after any thought at all, one should see that fraud drives up the cost for all of us.

> And the overhead of fighting this eats into school resources

Not if they continue to ignore it, because once again, it's not their money being sent to scammers.

> And loan fraud just drives up the cost of loans for everybody else.

Doesn't sound like a problem for the involved parties.

> So, sure, without putting much thought into it, an individual might not care. But after any thought at all, one should see that fraud drives up the cost for all of us.

You might care. I might care. But I guarantee that the involved parties do not care for even three seconds of their day about it. They have much more important things to think about, such as what color of the ballons for their kids next birthday party.

> But I guarantee that the involved parties do not care for even three seconds of their day about it.

yes -- based on real life interaction with real low-level accounting middle class bureaucrats in California, I agree that most of the people who are professionals in Federal student aid do not personally care about this bigger system. More importantly they care about their own paychecks, which most of them use to buy things for their own family events.

Probably course completion rates and other metrics that make your service eligible for loans in the first place.

If course completion rate becomes the metric that brings in money, it will quickly soar to 100% or maybe above. See: Goodhart's Law.

Well, that's kind of the whole idea behind college, isn't it...

It becomes meaningless when the professors are pressured to pass failing students to make the numbers look good.

Like what happens with lower schools under the "no child left behind" doctrine?

I was thinking of students who dropped out. It's a different fraud if the institution is claiming re-enrollments that never happened.

> 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.

Key word: "popular."

A dean's most important question: "How are we gonna pay the bills?"

Well, if the number of ghost students in a department's popular class just doubled and eventually get dropped from the roll, that means the number of bona fide students completing that class also went down.

If you're the professor of that class, you want to make it crystal clear to the dean that this is an otherwise popular class getting hit by a scam, and not a class that's organically becoming less popular year over year.

Communicating this distinction to the dean is paramount-- the prof's pay and job stability depends on the scam being addressed for next quarter/semester. And those concerns bubble up from dept dean up the administration.

I mean, as I write this I start to wonder the opposite of you-- how could anyone in this chain of authority not prioritize addressing this issue?

Some people take pride in their work.

The lost money comes from the taxpayer. But that loan money was going to be used to pay the school; and presumably if the student doesn’t have that loan money, they ain’t gonna be paying (or attending, because they can no longer afford to do so). So schools should care. And the students should care — they don’t get to join the school. And the government should care — their funds just went into a void. And the taxpayers should care — their money just went into a void, and some number of their kids just got denied college access.

What involved party shouldn’t care?

>The lost money comes from the taxpayer

not necessarily

I think they're making a cynical comment about incentives and government waste.

There's some truth to this if the people in charge of the process are not the ones paying.

I've seen gratuitous waste in government due to indifference. It can happen in the private sector too.

> But that loan money was going to be used to pay the school; and presumably if the student doesn’t have that loan money, they ain’t gonna be paying (or attending, because they can no longer afford to do so). So schools should care.

I don't think this is a correct model of the situation. As far as I know, it isn't the case that there's a fixed budget for student loan disbursals and all of it will go to some school or other unless it gets stolen. Rather, if more people ask for student loans, more money gets disbursed, and if fewer people ask for loans, less money gets disbursed. So the amount of money the school gets wouldn't be affected.