Fraud in California Community Colleges Triggers Call for Trump Investigation
Nine Republican U.S. representatives are calling on U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon and U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate financial aid fraud at California's community colleges. In a separate letter sent Wednesday, state Assemblymember Blanca Rubio, a West Covina Democrat, asked the state to conduct its own audit on the matter.
This rare moment of bipartisan concern comes after CalMatters reported that fake community college students have stolen more than $10 million in federal financial aid and more than $3 million in state aid in the last 12 months.
In their April 11 letter to Bondi and McMahon, which cites CalMatters' reporting, California's Republican representatives say that investigating fraud at California's community colleges should be part of President Donald Trump's ongoing efforts to 'curb wasteful federal spending.'
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The California Community Colleges Chancellor's Office has 'not been contacted by the U.S. Department of Education or the U.S. Attorney General about an investigation,' said Chris Ferguson, one of the office's executive vice chancellors, in an email to CalMatters Thursday.
Assemblymember Rubio's letter calls for a state audit that would examine the scope of fraud and the efforts to prevent it. State legislators will decide this June whether to pursue that audit, which could take years to complete.
California community colleges have been struggling to address fake students and financial aid fraud for years. Last spring, CalMatters reported that scammers continued to evade detection and that community colleges reported giving away over $5 million in federal funds and over $1.5 million in state and local aid. Earlier this month, CalMatters found the problem is only getting worse.
'Allowing this rise in fraud to go unaddressed is negligent on the Community College system, as these bad actors take away opportunities from real students in impacted courses such as accounting, nursing, etc,' wrote the California Republican representatives in their letter.
While students, faculty and community college administrators in California agree that it's a serious and growing problem, they question whether an investigation or an audit will lead to a better solution.
Fraud is 'a legitimate concern,' said Larry Galizio, president of the Community College League of California, which represents the interests of the state's 73 community college districts — but the letter to the education department and the attorney general is 'disingenuous' and 'just flat wrong' in claiming that it's gone unaddressed.
California has allocated more than $150 million since 2022 to improve cybersecurity at its community colleges.
'Blaming the victim and then cutting resources to the very entities that are trying to combat the fraud is not a policy approach that's going to be effective,' Galizio said.
Overwhelmed with the number of fake students in their classes, 'some of our faculty members feel like they've been screaming into the void,' said Stephanie Goldman, executive director of the faculty association of California Community Colleges. She said the federal scrutiny is particularly ironic, given that the Trump administration has dismantled the U.S. Department of Education and hampered its ability to investigate fraud.
Representative Young Kim — who flipped her Orange County district in 2020 — led the effort to write the congressional letter. Her spokesperson, Callie Strock, refused to respond directly to criticisms when CalMatters asked about them. She said Kim is still learning about the issue and that 'California has a long history of abusing taxpayer dollars.'
Since Trump's inauguration in January, the federal government has regularly criticized California's colleges and universities. The U.S. Department of Justice is investigating Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCLA, and UC Irvine for allegedly discriminating against students in the name of 'diversity, equity and inclusion' — even though affirmative action has been illegal in California since 1996. The administration is also going after numerous UC campuses, as well as Sacramento State and Santa Monica College, for allegedly allowing 'antisemitic harassment and discrimination.'
California is fighting back by working with other states to file numerous lawsuits, such as one that attempts to stop the Trump administration from cancelling federal grants and another to prevent the dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education.
But in this instance, the call to investigate California's higher education system for fraud stems from California's elected representatives, not from Trump or his cabinet. Kim's spokesperson did not clarify whether officials from the Trump administration would actually pursue an investigation.
For Ivan Hernandez, a student at Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, fraud is a low priority. Hernandez is the president of the community college students' association, and while he said he suspects that some of the students in his online courses are fake — or at least are using AI to submit assignments — he's more concerned with homelessness and food insecurity, which affect as many as half of California's roughly 2 million community college students.
Financial aid is supposed to pay for tuition, but low-income community college students pay little or no tuition in California, so the money goes directly into their pockets to offset the state's high cost of housing and food. Most students who attend California's community colleges are low-income and work a part- or full-time job.
Ferguson, with the state chancellor's office, said 'it's crucial to emphasize' that many fraudulent students are stopped before they can enroll. 'For the nanoscopic number of criminals that did get past the application stage and moved to the enrollment stage, an even smaller number was able to breach the financial aid stage,' he said.
'Financial aid fraud in the California Community Colleges system is extremely low relative to the billions of dollars of state and federal aid disbursed — about 0.21% in FY 2023-24. That means 99.8% of financial aid was disbursed to real students in our system.'
This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license. This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.
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