The California college admissions process has once again found itself in the middle of a quagmire.
First, celebrity parents were paying to get their children into California universities; now it has been discovered that there were around 180,000 phony college registrations in the state’s junior college system last semester. And with these bogus registrations come millions of dollars in stolen financial aid, the Washington Examiner reported.
Even more concerning, California’s politicians are not actively trying to prevent this fraud. And some believe this inaction is being done on purpose.
“They do not want to fix this because the amount of funding they are going to lose is astronomical,” Kim Rich, a professor of criminal justice at Pierce College, said of the junior colleges that are benefiting from fraudulent enrollment. “The lower their enrollment, the less they get funded by the state. If [school] districts are going to take out or prevent students from being enrolled, they are going to lose funding.”
Rich was one of the professors who noticed her student enrollment list did not match her classroom’s actual attendance. Approximately 30% of the students listed on her course’s roster were phony. Included in the bogus registrations was a student named “5100.”
Yet, the real victim in all this is the taxpayer. The scammers benefit by getting access to millions of dollars they would not otherwise have. And, as Rich explained, colleges benefit because the more students enrolled, the more funding they receive. So, in a weird, convoluted way, enrollment fraud helps them. But when it is all said and done, the taxpayers are footing the bill for enrollment fraud, and no one seems to care.
California taxpayers don’t seem to care about all this fraud — and why should they? Federal taxpayers are footing the bill through enhanced COVID-19 aid. At some point, Congress has to step in.
It’s bad enough that the Democratic Party allows fraudsters to victimize California taxpayers: Just look at all the money they allowed to get stolen through their lax unemployment system. But we can’t allow Golden State fraud to drain federal coffers as well.
