Bots were a hot topic at the Cerritos College Faculty Senate meeting on Oct. 22 as top members from various management services on campus gave a presentation to the Senate about their work combating the bots.

“Fraudulent activity from ‘bot students’ has been a growing problem at Cerritos College for several years, affecting the quality of instruction, course viability, and completion rates,” according to Terrance Mullins, the Faculty Senate president.

According to the presentation by Yvette Tafoya, the dean of enrollment services: Laura Estrada, the assistant director of admissions and records; and Jamie Quiroz the assistant director of financial aid, bot detections have been increasing and have been taking large portions of financial aid.

They talked about how, since 2022, they’ve put holds on over 35,000 accounts – in just the fall 2024 semester alone they’ve flagged more than 9,000 more accounts and only 18% of those accounts managed to clear their hold.

They also described how, of the students who received financial aid, only about 1% were flagged as bots. That 1%, however, managed to take about 2% of the total aid – a staggering one million dollars that could have gone to real students.

Tafoya and the others described some of the various methods they’ve been using in their battle to catch bot students: an ID service called ID.me, working with the college’s IT department, following bot trends, asking to change aid dispersal and increasing automation as much work is done manually at the moment.

They noted that this has continued to be difficult despite their progress for a variety of reasons: the bot hosters adapt fast and are sophisticated, ID verification isn’t necessary to apply for college or financial aid, it’s a national issue that even the federal government is struggling with, and that the harder they make it for bots to enroll, the more likely they are to also stop real people.

Mullins said, “The current strategy of relying on our enrollment services office, which has limited staffing, to manually track and remove thousands of fake enrollments is unsustainable.”

“Addressing this issue requires a practical response, including increased resources for enrollment services. However, it remains uncertain whether the administration will take the necessary steps to enhance staffing.”

A faculty member in the audience also said that they wanted this to continue being brought up and expressed disappointment that there were no longer any administrators in the room.

Librarian Stephanie Rosenblatt, who’s also the former Cerritos College Faculty Federation president and the current department chair for the library, voiced her frustration with the financial aid department’s decision to limit funds they give to students.

The department made it so that if a student takes a class not part of their degree plan, the financial aid department may not pay for it or count it toward units for pell grants, etc.

She argues that these limits effectively got rid of the undecided major option for the overwhelming majority of students who rely on financial aid – undecided majors don’t have degree plans.

She further argued that this could limit the scope of classes at the college and will impact several different programs on the campus.

One of the other large sticking points for her was also how this decision was made by financial aid without consultation with the other faculty.

“I understand why they were trying to do something to fight the bots, but I feel this should have been done in consultation with faculty because of the impact on the curriculum – as far as I know, no formal discussions were had,” Rosenblatt said.

“I would feel more comfortable with these kinds of decisions if they were discussed by faculty first because then if a decision was made that I don’t like, at least I know that my peers thought it was a good choice,” she added.

She said, “I hope [financial aid will] come up with a solution so you can be undecided.”