Ghost students are creating an 'agonizing' problem for Calif. colleges

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NEWS | BAY AREA & STATE
Ghost students are creating an 'agonizing' problem for Calif. colleges


FILE: A person walks past the Student Health Center at City College of San Francisco.
Lea Suzuki/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty

By Madilynne Medina,
News Reporter
May 7, 2025

When the pandemic upended the world of higher education, Robin Pugh, a professor at City College of San Francisco, began to see one puzzling problem in her online courses: Not everyone was a real student.

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. But during the current spring semester, Pugh said that number more than doubled when she had to cut 11 students. It’s a strange new reality that has left her baffled.


Susan Akana, City College of San Francisco professor of biology, walks into the Science Hall at City College of San Francisco Ocean Campus on Nov. 16, 2015, in San Francisco.
Lea Suzuki/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty

“It’s really unclear to me, and beyond the scope of my knowledge, how this is really happening,” she said. “Is it organized crime? Is it something else? Everybody has lots of theories.”

Some of the disengaged students in Pugh’s courses are what administrators and cybersecurity experts say are “ghost students,” and they’ve been a growing problem for community colleges, particularly since the shift to online instruction during the pandemic. These “ghost students” are artificially intelligent agents or bots that pose as real students in order to steal millions of dollars of financial aid that could otherwise go to actual humans. And as colleges grapple with the problem, Pugh and her colleagues have been tasked with a new and “frustrating” task of weeding out these bots and trying to decide who’s a real person.
The process, she said, takes her focus off teaching the real students.

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