By Tom Whitehead
The administration’s actions to combat ghost students appear to finally be taking effect, just in time for fall enrollment. The hope on the horizon comes despite continued enrollment challenges for the summer session.
Only nine days after the start of summer enrollment, The Guardsman surveyed 84 class sections in 54 introductory-level courses and revealed that 86% had no seats available, and 76% had no waiting-list seats. This suggests that legitimate students wanting to get into classes this summer may need to attend the first class meeting and ask the professor to be added.
However, on May 10, just days after fall enrollment opened, many seats were still available in all of the nearly 190 class sections of the 50 introductory-level courses surveyed – a promising indicator that ghost student activity has been greatly reduced.
Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs, Lisa Cooper-Wilkins, confirmed that the number of ghost students is down considerably for the fall. “The number I heard was 75%, at least at this point.”
“I know that at least for the start of the summer term, there was a considerably larger number of students who were identified [as ghost students], so going into the fall, I think the same thing will be true,” Cooper-Wilkins said.
Vice Chancellor of Academic and Institutional Affairs David Yee explained that although he has not yet seen any numbers from the Department of Research and Planning, he was glad to hear that there is at least anecdotal evidence of lower ghost student activity in the Fall enrollment.
What has changed is that the college has been actively sharing information with the State Chancellor’s office, and vice versa, with the State Chancellor’s office doing additional upstream identity verification.
Yee said the new measures implemented for the Fall Semester have caught some fraudsters in the act. The college has also started working with the City Attorney’s office and the State Attorney General’s office to prosecute those they catch.
Cooper-Wilkins said that while enhancing the screening measures will identify more ghost students, she’s worried that it may also misidentify some real students who, for whatever reason, fit the profile of a ghost student.
“On rare occasions, somebody posing as a real student may actually come into the college, to answer the verification requests and instead be apprehended, but we just don’t have a lot of history with that at this point,” Cooper-Wilkins said.
“There has been broad communication among community colleges across the state about what the different schools are experiencing and the approaches they take, including recommendations about best practices,” Cooper-Wilkins explained. They also share information about fraud detection systems, despite each college being on its own to identify, procure and test these systems.
The cost to purchase fraud detection software alone is expected to be on the order of $55,000. In addition, there are annual transaction costs of roughly the same magnitude. Neither of which accounts for the cost of the time that officials and faculty have to devote to staying ahead of the fraud rings.
Fortunately, the college has hired a new Chief Technology Officer, Patrick Ekoue-Totou, who started on May 2 and will reside in the Finance and Administration department. As the College of Marin’s chief information officer for the past 11 years, Ekoue-Totou developed expertise in cybersecurity.
“He has already played a big role in terms of assessing software. There are many best practices that we may be able to employ to strengthen our systems further here that Patrick implemented,” said Yulian Ligioso, Interim Vice Chancellor of Finance and Administration.
Administrators at the college agree that part of the success strategy depends on keeping the fraud rings in the dark about the specifics of the measures being implemented.
Yee admitted that some ghost students will manage to get through despite these measures. “The faculty are the last line of defense” for identifying ghost students who manage to get past the detection systems and occupy seats in the classroom. Yee reminded students that they aren’t powerless in identifying ghost students either. “For example, when they’re working on a team project and notice one of the members is not participating.”
Despite the progress made, the call to action for faculty and students serves as a reminder that the college is not out of the woods yet.