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As feds plan new measures to prevent financial aid fraud, colleges hope real students still enroll
The 2025-26 FAFSA form.

Credit: Andrew Reed
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California’s community colleges have dispersed $14 million and likely much more in financial aid to fraudsters.

The U.S. Department of Education says colleges must verify the identities of more students this summer. In the fall, it plans to launch permanent screening.

Colleges worry that the new measures could burden students too much and prevent some from enrolling.
California colleges are worried that new federal measures seeking to crack down on financial aid fraud, which has stolen millions in grants, could result in the unintended consequence of fewer legitimate students enrolling.

At California’s community colleges, where the fraud has been most pronounced in the state, financial aid officials hope the new steps will strike a balance between deterring bad actors while also minimizing the burden on real students. Some students may find taking extra steps to prove their identity to be an extra barrier to enrolling, possibly scaring them off, administrators say.

“How do we do fraud mitigation, but also still have students apply? The more barriers, the harder we make it to get in our systems, the less people will come,” said Tina Vasconcellos, associate vice chancellor of educational services at the Peralta Community College District. “It’s great the federal government wants to help us and cut down on fraud, but at the same time, is it going to create another hoop for our students to jump through to get to us in the first place?”

The U.S. Department of Education announced last month it will roll out new ways to verify the identities of students who apply for aid. Most of the fraud has tapped federal aid, in the form of Pell Grants intended for low-income students, but some state and local aid has also been stolen in California and elsewhere.

The federal department said it would require colleges this summer to verify the identities of additional first-time applicants. That will apply to about 125,000 students in total nationwide, but the department didn’t say how that will be split among the colleges. To get verified, students will have to show government-issued identification such as a passport or driver’s license. If the college determines that a student is unable to show the identification in person, the student can be given the option to do so on a video call.

“Although we recognize that these verification selections could be challenging for some institutions and students, it is a critically important and targeted step toward preventing fraud,” the department wrote in an announcement.

The additional verification for the summer term is only a temporary solution before the department implements a permanent screening process for every financial aid applicant for the upcoming fall term.

Officials have not said what that process will entail in the fall. Among the possibilities, college officials speculate that requiring more students to come in person to prove they are real, which could be potentially challenging for students who live far away and take entire course loads online.

Community colleges have been plagued by financial aid scammers who target those institutions because they are open-access and offer many classes fully online. That makes it much easier to enroll in classes online and be eligible for aid. At least $14 million in aid, and likely much more, has been dispersed to fraudsters at California community colleges since 2021.

It’s also easier to defraud community colleges than more expensive universities because tuition is so low or otherwise covered, and much of the grants go directly to students for living costs, rather than to the colleges for tuition.

“We don’t know what the plan is for the fall,” said Jill Desjean, the director of policy analysis at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. Ideally, Desjean said, the process would be automated so that additional steps aren’t required of students or staff. “There’s just a limit to what the schools can do.”

Pretending to be legitimate students, fraudsters start by applying for admission online. Some of them are caught there, but others successfully get admitted and enroll in classes. At that point, they can request financial aid, which, if they’re successful, gets distributed to personal bank accounts via direct deposit.

Beyond stealing aid, the scams have additional consequences for real students. Since each course has a finite number of seats, genuine students are sometimes left on waiting lists and can’t enroll because fraudsters are taking up the available seats.

In a statement when the new measures were announced, U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said the department “has a responsibility to act” because fraud is “taking aid away from eligible students, disrupting the operations of colleges, and ripping off taxpayers.”

Jasmine Ruys, vice president of student services at College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita, acknowledged that “it’s our job to make sure that fraud is not happening and that we’re good stewards of taxpayer money.”

She added, though, that the college strives to balance that responsibility with not asking too much of students.

“Some students work during the day, so they might have to take time off work to be able to come over to us to verify,” Ruys added. “So we try really hard not to put any kind of barriers up for a student.”

Even being asked to upload additional documents online could be difficult for some students, said Vasconcellos of the Peralta district, which serves Oakland and the rest of northern Alameda County.

“We still have a digital divide. There are students within our community who have less access to all aspects of technology,” she said. “A lot of our students are actually still using their phones to take their classes. So what I’d be concerned about is if the technology on the receiving end isn’t working and if it’s not easy to upload your ID, or whatever it is that they’re asking for, it’s going to potentially be a barrier.”

Vasconcellos and Ruys both said they’re hopeful that whatever the department implements this fall will be something that doesn’t require much extra from students.

One possible solution, Ruys said, would be to add something at the beginning of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), so the verification happens quickly rather than when students are getting ready to start their classes. That could be something similar to ID.me, an online identity verification platform already being used by many community colleges.

It’s not clear, however, whether the department is considering that option.

“Whatever it is, we’re going to abide by all laws,” Ruys said. “We just hope that it doesn’t limit our students from being able to enroll and attend college.”
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03/07/2025
Report shows few California college students enroll in CalFresh, despite qualifying
At the University of California, Irvine, the basic needs center offers a food pantry, housing support and more to meet students’ basic needs.

Photo: UCI Basic Needs Center

Few college students participate in the state’s CalFresh food program despite being eligible, according to a report published Tuesday by the University of California’s California Policy Lab.

The report, “Filling the Gap: CalFresh Eligibility Among University of California and California Community College Students,” is the first to link together datasets that provide estimates on the number of California college students who are eligible for CalFresh, the state’s food benefits program, in addition to their take-up rate — the share of students who are eligible and also participate in the program.

The report’s authors found that CalFresh eligibility and students’ subsequent enrollment in the program depended significantly on which institution of higher learning they attended, age, housing situation, and other factors. The school they were enrolled in was often connected to the level of outreach they received informing them of the food benefits program and whether they received a certain financial aid grant that made them eligible for CalFresh.

“California in the last few years has been increasingly focused on this channel of potential support for college students. It’s one of the pieces that students can paste together to put together a financial package that allows them to go to college,” said Jesse Rothstein, report co-author, about the CalFresh program.

CalFresh, once known as food stamps, is designed to provide money for groceries for California residents, making it a significant support program for low-income students. College students are typically eligible for CalFresh if they meet the regular rules that everyone, whether a student or not, must meet, in addition to at least one of more than a dozen exemptions. Understanding the long list of eligibility criteria specific to students has long been seen as a significant barrier for students, according to the report.

“But because CalFresh is run by a different agency — it’s not part of the education system — I think it’s hard for students to navigate,” said Rothstein, Carmel P. Friesen Professor of Public Policy and Economics at UC Berkeley and the faculty director of the California Policy Lab’s UC Berkeley site.

The data for the report was collected by the UC’s California Policy Lab from four institutions: California Community College Chancellor’s Office, University of California Office of the President, California Department of Social Services and California Student Aid Commission.

In gathering data from these four agencies, the authors developed a database connecting college enrollment numbers, monthly CalFresh participation records, and annual federal financial aid (FAFSA) details.

The data points to differences in eligibility and take-up rates between students in the California community colleges and the UC campuses as well as which students actually enroll to receive the benefits if they are eligible.

Data from the fall of 2019, the semester immediately prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, provides one of the clearest examples. During that time, the data showed a significant discrepancy between students who were eligible for CalFresh versus those who applied to receive the food aid — and further disparities depending on whether students were enrolled in a community college or a UC.

They found that 20% of community college students, 33% of UC undergraduates and 7% of UC graduate students were likely eligible for CalFresh. Yet just 26% of eligible community college students, 22% of eligible UC undergraduates, and 27% of eligible UC graduate students actually enrolled to receive CalFresh benefits.

The authors suggest a few reasons for the discrepancies.

First, UC students are less likely to live at home with their parents, increasing their chances of being eligible for CalFresh.

Second, students in the community colleges are overall less likely to be eligible for CalFresh. This is because “the version of the Cal Grant given to UC students qualifies many of them for CalFresh eligibility, but the version given to CCC students does not,” per the report’s authors.

And, finally, the UC has increased outreach efforts to enroll more eligible students into basic needs programs like CalFresh. This would explain, the authors wrote, why the take-up rate among UC undergraduates has increased substantially since 2017, while the same rate among community college students has declined.

The authors note that they can only provide data estimates in the report because the multiple eligibility determination factors may be captured inaccurately, although errors were likely insignificant and “our estimates are a good approximation of the share of students who would be found eligible under individualized determinations.”

A deeper look into data from the fall of 2019 highlights important details, including:
- The Central Coast’s UC Santa Barbara had the third-highest eligibility rate at 37% but the highest take-up rate at 37%
- Of the community college regions statewide, the Central Valley had both the highest eligibility rate at 29% and the highest take-up rate at 33%, while the Bay Area had the lowest eligibility rate at 15% and the lowest take-up rate at 20%
- Black and Latino students were more likely to be eligible than white or Asian peers regardless of the institution attended
- When it came to actually enrolling in CalFresh, Black and Latino students were more likely to do so if attending a UC, but Latino students were less likely to enroll in the program if attending a community college
- Students over the age of 23 had higher take-up rates than those 23 years and younger at both institutions
Some of those details were expected given the history of outreach out of certain institutions. Santa Barbara County and UC Santa Barbara, for example, have long worked toward smoothing out the process for students to both determine their CalFresh eligibility and to apply for the program.

Other details, such as the low take-up rates in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area, highlight the potential need for additional outreach in regions with increasingly high housing and cost of living expenses. Among community college students in Los Angeles, just 5% of the population were both eligible and participating in CalFresh during the fall of 2019. That number is 3% during the same timeframe in the Bay Area.

The development of a new dataset

The report included data from millions of students who attended UC and community college campuses between the 2010-11 and 2021-22 school years. While the report’s authors were largely focused on the most recent data, they included previous years’ data that was consistent across the four agencies they had data sharing agreements with — and this happened to take them as far back as the 2010-11 school year.

The bulk of the project took about four years to complete, according to Rothstein, who noted that this project took “longer than most” he’s worked on in his career. The team first needed to execute data sharing agreements between each of the institutions included in the report and then clean it up to ensure accuracy.

“It’s really beyond the ability of the individual agencies to do this kind of project,” said Rothstein.“It just takes too long and requires too much collaboration between agencies.”

Notably missing from the institutions that shared their data was California State University, which is the nation’s largest four-year public university system.

The CSU “was more reluctant” to share their data, said Rothstein, and his team decided to move forward without that system’s information. He noted that his team plans to work on another edition of the report in which they hope to be able to include CSU data.

“Our hope is that by kind of developing long-term relationships with the agencies we can build the trust that’s required to do this kind of project,” said Rothstein. “We can also build the kind of specialized knowledge of the individual data sets that makes it possible.”

The story has been updated to reflect changes made to the report by the California Policy Lab.
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26/05/2025
Breaking News! Trump Revokes Harvard’s Ability to Enroll International students

The Trump administration upped the stakes in its vindictive campaign against Harvard University. It has canceled Harvard’s enrollment of international students.

Harvard refused to cave to the Trump administration’s demands to monitor its curriculum and its admissions and hiring policies. In response, the administration has suspended billions of federal dollars for medical and scientific research.

The New York Times reported:

The Trump administration on Thursday halted Harvard University’s ability to enroll international students, taking aim at a crucial funding source for the nation’s oldest and wealthiest college in a major escalation in the administration’s efforts to pressure the elite school to fall in line with the president’s agenda.

The administration notified Harvard about the decision after a back-and-forth in recent days over the legality of a sprawling records request as part of the Department of Homeland Security’s investigation, according to three people with knowledge of the negotiations. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

The latest move is likely to prompt a second legal challenge from Harvard, according to one person familiar with the school’s thinking who insisted on anonymity to discuss private deliberations. The university sued the administration last month over the government’s attempt to impose changes to its curriculum, admissions policies and hiring practices.

“I am writing to inform you that effective immediately, Harvard University’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification is revoked,” according to a letter sent to the university by Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary. A copy of the letter was obtained by The New York Times.

About 6,800 international students attended Harvard this year, or roughly 27 percent of the student body, according to university enrollment data. That is up from 19.7 percent in 2010.

The move is likely to have a significant effect on the university’s bottom line…

In a news release confirming the administration’s action, the Department of Homeland Security sent a stark message to Harvard’s international students: “This means Harvard can no longer enroll foreign students, and existing foreign students must transfer or lose their legal status.”

This message came from a Cabinet member who was asked in a hearing to define “habeas corpus,” and she said it meant that the President can deport anyone he wants to.

This action is a demonstration of Presidential tyranny. It should be swiftly reversed by the courts.

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23/05/2025