Valley College Uses ID System to Battle Enrollment Bots

The LACCD requires new students at its nine campuses to verify their identity in order to enroll in classes. 

By: Hillary Van Hoose, Copy Editor

Students beginning classes this semester might be surprised to learn that some of their classmates could be bots or fraudulent enrollments, but Valley College and LACCD are finding new ways to battle the bots.

Such steps have become necessary because, along with the boom of availability for online and hybrid classes that benefitted remote learners during the beginning of the pandemic, there also came a wave of scammers seeking to defraud taxpayers of millions of dollars worth of COVID-19 relief grants and other financial aid.

College officials have suggested that LACCD was targeted partly because the same open enrollment system and lack of application fee that makes education more accessible for real students also made it easier for bots to enroll and apply for financial aid.

During a campus update meeting, President Barry Gribbons described what steps Valley is taking to prevent this kind of cyber-crime.

“We have implemented a lot of procedural changes in the last month district-wide, and many folks had concerns about these procedures because they are quite restrictive, and now we make every new student who didn’t go through ID.me and who’s not part of a special program or a special population get verified live in-person or through Cranium Cafe, showing identification,” said Gribbons.

The Los Angeles Times reported in 2021 that “three-quarters of [bot] traffic was caught by new software called Imperva Advanced Bot Protection” according to Valerie Lundy-Wagner, interim vice chancellor of digital innovation and infrastructure. Despite such measures, reports obtained by CalMatters showed that “between September 2021 and January 2024, [California community] colleges received roughly 900,000 fraudulent college applications and gave fraudsters more than $5 million in federal aid, as well as nearly $1.5 million in state and local aid.”

The continuing uptick in bot activity provoked increased safeguards by LACCD officials.

“That’s quite a bit of change, and it’s an extra obstacle for our students,” Gribbons said, “but in the late spring and early summer we saw such a surge, tens of thousands of fraudulent students trying to get into the district and taking up seats from real students, that district-wide we implemented that.”

Taking up seats in classes and stealing financial aid aren’t the only havoc bots are wreaking either. Colleges base decisions about which classes and sections to offer, and funding for diversity initiatives, upon the data collected from enrollment – numbers that get skewed by bots and fake enrollments.

Child development major Kendra Strickland said her communications instructor was taking safeguards to make sure the students were real. 

She said her online welcome post from the instructor read, “I will remove any students that appear to abuse plagiarism or any fake students that are artificial intelligence. If you are red-flagged, you will be requested to join an immediate Zoom meeting to present your Valley ID for visual verification.”

Although enrollment numbers for this semester are still changing daily, Gribbons pointed out some of the notable demographics skewed by bot enrollment that are visible in current weekly reports.

“District-wide, the number of white students was the biggest numeric drop [from last year], down 1600 students,” said Gribbons. “I think that might reflect some bot activity the previous year [...] because we’ve observed the past six months, when we saw a surge in fraudulent students, that for some reason the vast majority indicated that they were white as well as older. And you can see that, also with the district, over-25 accounts for about 1,700 of the enrollment drop.”