AI Goes to College for the Free Money
21 comments
·April 28, 2025ujkhsjkdhf234
skybrian
Yes. The linked article seems pretty good, though.
https://calmatters.org/education/higher-education/2024/04/fi...
empath75
Yeah, I think rolling back some of the COVID-era stuff and going back to in-person applications and verifications would be good enough.
ujkhsjkdhf234
In-person verification is something they should go back to. I did most of my classes online when I was in community college but I had to go to the registrar to meet with a counselor and the bursar on campus to finish my admission. After that I never went to campus again. I think that is fair.
gruez
>The bots’ goal is to bilk state and federal financial aid money by enrolling in classes, and remaining enrolled in them, long enough for aid disbursements to go out.
California and the federal government collects taxes and processes tax returns, right? Why can't payments be made through the same system? That'd probably reduce fraud by an order of magnitude.
skybrian
When things go fully remote, it enables fully-remote fraud. Another example is North Koreans applying for jobs.
If we want remote work and remote education to work better (and I think we should), we will need better identity checking. Would it really be that hard to make something like using a notary scale?
conductr
It's not full proof but something as simple as snail mailing a secret token for the human to confirm could be a large deterrent to a lot of online fraud. If you use a stolen credit card with a billing zip code of 12345 and can't receive snail mail in the same zip code, that's a red flag.
Maybe it's not this but point is, just make the person do some IRL action. Visit the registrars office to get an ID photocopied, or something like that. It's great to have everything online now, but it doesn't have to be 100% all the time. Just streamline the IRL part as much as possible and keep it as a security check in the process if nothing else.
pglevy
As much as I would like it to, I don't think fully remote is going to survive this. These problems are going to get worse and we'll naturally revert to doing things in person to feel more secure.
yieldcrv
North Koreans doing the actual work isn’t fraud to me. But I understand your point.
Silicon Valley is built by Russian money in VC funds being spent on North Korean employees.
gruez
>North Koreans doing the actual work isn’t fraud to me.
It's fraud when you misrepresent yourself as not-north korean, just like if a chinese manufacturer represents their widget as non-chinese.
yieldcrv
yeah there are many legal problems:
no work authorization to being paid by a US company
sanctions violations
misrepresenting at all (I think tech hiring should be double-blind though)
and given that some employers combat this by asking candidates to insult Kim Jong Un, this is a legal problems in North Korea if the candidate passes!
but to me, these are all fake problems. these are competent human beings that are just doing the job description. not leaving backdoors, not taking trade secrets. just “owning” the signup page of the same pointless copycat startup as any American dev.
andy99
I can't read the page because of the cloudflare blocker. They really are destroying the internet, and anyone who wants people to actually see their content needs to stop using them.
gruez
Works fine for me even with VPN, ublock origin, and RFP enabled.
thesuitonym
Source: Someone has a gut feeling.
gruez
The "someone" is California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office, and the linked article mentions how they identify fraudulent submissions.
The leap to "we need Sam Altman's Worldcoin to track everyone" as a solution seems like an extreme jump that skips many less privacy invasion, less expensive, less insane solutions.