[RHSeeger]

How do you handle students that are not capable of showing up on the first day in-person?

- Live far away

- Have a job they can't just not show up for

- Having children to take care of

- Health issues

There's tons of reasons for people not to be able to attend in person, and not all of them are "because I didn't want to". And, for a _lot_ of those people, improving their education can have a huge impact on their quality of life.

[ethagknight]

Can’t show up for one day? That is such an incredibly low bar to also ask them to sit through a long series of courses and test. These college colleges are state funded, so if the person is overseas or on the opposite side of the US… then what are we really funding? That’s not the intent of a “community college”.

[RHSeeger]

> then what are we really funding

A single mother than works at Walmart and another job delivering food, trying to support her kid(s), and will get let go if she misses a day at work; who is desperately trying to better herself so she can provide a better future for her family?

Look, I get that it's a balance between stopping the cheaters and not putting undue burden on the good ones. But it's not a simple problem, and there's a lot of people out there that are under constraints that a lot of us wouldn't even consider when trying to work out the solution.

[ethagknight]

Funny you should choose Walmart as your hardship example, as they have a very generous educational benefit program for their employees. Many corporations do. All are contingent upon showing up for work! It’s ok to have obligations in exchange for benefits.

[beej71]

One way to lower the bar would be to show up any day before you could collect financial aid.

[themaninthedark]

I would say, not have to show up for Day 1 but how about have to show up at the collage with a state issued ID in order to have funds released to their account?

It looks like the main issue is that the people committing the fraud are able to create student profiles and request student aid with these profiles. I am unsure of California's requirements but this generally requires a SSN. California is issuing Real ID so verification should be relatively easy.

[arp242]

Presumably we would handle that in the same way we did up until ~5 years ago or so.

Right now people can't enrol in "full" classes either, except the classes are "full" of bots.

And a single day of attendance is really not a very high bar to meet. For special cases where it's really a problem accommodations can be made on request.

[disambiguation]

For special cases, the committee can come to you!