Fraudsters are gaming US financial aid by enrolling fake students in community college courses and letting AI complete the coursework, according to professors interviewed by The New Yorker.
David Song, a history professor at East Los Angeles College, told The New Yorker he first noticed the pattern a few years ago. Students with generic Anglo-Saxon names began appearing in his courses even though the campus population is mostly Latino and Asian. Their explanations did not add up, including claims about having taken courses on Asian American topics that Song says did not check out.
AI completes the coursework
Song allows AI in his classroom but requires labeling and academic honesty. He says those rules are widely ignored, "even with the content that's blatantly generated."
The worst abuse happens in asynchronous online courses, where students remain anonymous and never appear on camera. Other instructors describe a similar environment. History professor David Roach estimates that more than half of his students use AI for papers, and questions whether widespread cheating was always waiting for an easy enough opportunity.
The scheme works because financial aid follows enrollment. A fake student can be registered, collect aid, and have AI-generated work satisfy course requirements without anyone meeting the person behind the account.
The bigger picture
The New Yorker piece, titled "The Despair of the Professor in the Age of AI," frames the fraud as one symptom of a broader shift: AI has made it cheap to produce passable academic work at scale, and institutions are struggling to distinguish real students from automated ones.
Community colleges, which rely heavily on enrollment-driven funding, are especially exposed. The story adds a concrete fraud angle to the ongoing debate over AI detectors and academic integrity, and it shows the problem is not limited to elite universities.
