When Shannon McDonald arrived to teach her summer Music Appreciation class, she walked into an empty room.
Her roster said there were 15 students registered for her blended class on NE Campus. It turned out none of them were real.
“I was flabbergasted and so confused. I just had no idea what was going on,” McDonald said. “I had no background that this was even a possibility, that they were all fraudulent students.”
Fraudulent students are individuals who enroll for class with the intent to secure grants and loans through FAFSA by using stolen identities. This year, TCC has frozen 26,549 student accounts and labeled them as fake, more than triple the number in 2024.
“In 2024, we began noticing a rise in suspicious applications, prompting the college to establish internal processes to monitor and potentially identify fraud before these bad actors could reach the registration phase,” said TCC Provost Shelley Pearson.
It’s challenging to quantify the number of seats occupied by bad actors but according to Pearson, TCC is in the process of implementing a better way to detect suspicious applications at the point of submission before they can register for class.
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