Fake website calls out reality of ‘ghost student’ problem at Minnesota colleges

The threat of “ghost students” has become so prevalent at Minnesota’s largest community college that administrators now say nearly a third of all applications to the school are potentially fraudulent. 

That revelation recently came from Dara Hagen, vice president of Student Affairs at Normandale Community College in Bloomington.

Enrollment fraud — using stolen identities of real people with the goal of stealing taxpayer-funded student aid — has become a nationwide problem over the last few years. 

“Since then, we’ve had about 29,000 fraudulent or potentially fraudulent applications that we’ve processed,” Hagen said. “We were seeing probably 42% of our applications or so being fraudulent, and now we’re down to about 31%.”

The college says that figure represents applications that were flagged for further review before any student ...