If these institutions make it harder, more expensive or more time-consuming to enroll, they’re working against their goal of educating as many people as possible. Tackling the problem of ghost students requires a sensitivity to the impact any changes make on the entire admissions process. The goal is to cut down on enrollment fraud while minimizing the effects on legitimate students.
At first glance, it may seem that this isn’t an IT problem. However, that doesn’t mean that IT can’t help. Here are specific IT areas of expertise that can contribute to solving the problem of ghost students.
Bring IT-Style Risk Analysis to Student Applications
Those in the IT world have learned that risk is something measured on a sliding scale. It’s not that something is risky or isn’t; it’s that some things are riskier than others. Use that same methodology to address the problem of fraudulent applications. Use a scoring system for students and application metadata that measures multiple factors and builds an overall risk score. The higher the risk, the higher the level of scrutiny.
For example, if an application is coming from an IP address with a bad reputation or from a foreign country, a VPN or anonymization service, or a cloud-computing data center, those are all reasons to bump up the potential fraud score. If an application seems to be coming from a bot or has been generated by a script or automated system, that’s another red flag to consider.
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Help school officials understand that detecting fraud is not an all-or-nothing proposal. Show them IT’s own models for risk management as examples of how response to a threat should vary with the severity of the threat.
Leverage IT Knowledge About Identity and Access Management
IT teams have been studying identity and access management for years. One defining aspect of ghost students is that they have either stolen or entirely falsified identities. IT’s adeptness with identity verification, methods of checking unique identifiers (such as Social Security numbers and physical addresses), and analysis of email addresses, domain names and phone numbers for authenticity is an asset when it comes to finding suspicious applications.
IT teams can share their experience in integrating student ID systems with external validation sources and address verification application programming interfaces. These are valuable skills for IT to contribute that may not exist elsewhere in the school.
Drill Down With IT’s Experience in Scripting and Automation
Automation is one of IT’s most valuable skills, reducing manual work while maintaining consistency. Building scripts to automate checks and looking across student applications for unusual clusters or recycled information is all IT’s area of expertise.
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The application process may be built on a packaged software tool or even be a Software as a Service solution, but IT may still have relevant experience in building scripts and automation to help implement fraud checks and escalation actions.
Use IT’s Experience in ML and AI Tools To Detect Suspicious Applications
IT teams can bring their expertise in AI, neural networks and machine learning to bear on this problem. Years in the trenches with malware and spam filtering have made IT teams pretty good at building and managing tools to detect fraudulent patterns. We know that it’s better to have many small factors, even weak behavioral and contextual ones, running in a good machine learning algorithm than to depend on a smaller number of strong, focused factors. This kind of experience can complement other institutional experts who may know a lot about admissions but not as much about fraud and cybercrime.
Bring this knowledge and experience to the table, and you may be able to help the admissions teams build machine learning and statistical tools to identify high-risk ghost students as soon as they enter into the application system.
IT teams have broad experience in data integrity, cybersecurity and pattern analysis. These skills are all highly applicable to spotting ghost student applications, and IT should be part of the team identifying a solution to this problem.
