65k fake students applied for financial aid in wide community college scam
latimes.com
latimes.com
Or, of course, just charge less. I went to LA City 20 years ago. Had a bad experience unrelated to school itself at the first four-year I tried to attend and had to drop out. My parents couldn't actually afford to send me back, but the reported income was still over the threshold to get me enough aid to afford a four-year. So I started at a community college. It was $9 per credit hour at that point. Financial aid was not necessary. I just worked an overnight shift detailing the restrooms at Knott's Berry Farm theme park.
So for at least the first year of university i spent almost nothing on tuition. Which was nice for someone who was really struggling back then.
There is quite a bit of stuff that one can learn in a class that might not show up on a test. A few examples:
1. Certain small subject matter specifics that may not be measured on a relatively short timed test.
2. Discovering peer groups to study with.
3. The test structure at the university/department — some smart people get bombed early in their academic careers just because they aren’t familiar with the test type.
A well-structured series of courses can be built out assuming that each student in later courses has at least been exposed to certain ideas in earlier courses. If you test out, there is no guarantee that these learners have been exposed to those ideas. Yes, a better test could reveal all of this stuff, but making good tests or test banks is difficult and time consuming, and that assumes that there is some expertise in evaluation/testing in the department faculty (which is rare).
You're describing the quality of an education, while the previous commenters are describing how to game a title system to get the best brand. These are two different goals/outcomes.
In my case, the teacher "forgot" to give me the final for one of them, and only gave me the mid-term. Months later, they "discovered" that and made me take it then to keep my credit.
I said, "Give me the test right now." I took it, passed with flying colors.
They still didn't look happy. I'm still half-convinced they were trying to trip me up. Their classes were the easiest I have ever taken and I got a 4.0 GPA there. I knew I was just going for the paper, though, so it didn't bother me.
Joke's on me. That paper has never actually helped me get a job. sigh
Knowing that, in an interview, I won't be asked why I don't have a degree, has been at least 90% of the value of mine.
I don't even have "Education" paragraph in my resume, just skills and experience.
>A 2015 survey found that 62 percent of adjuncts earned less than $20,000 a year.
https://economichardship.org/2019/03/a-bigger-scandal-at-col...
- obtaining research grants
- department administration
- image management
They also sometimes teach courses, but more often than not, that duty can be given to a combination of adjunct professors and “graduate teaching assistants,” ie doctoral students.
Much of it I’m okay with organizationally except for the money/workload balance. It’s a race to the bottom to overwork and underpay for teaching duties.
The only downside of Community College is that it is not the same "college experience" that you get with University, which I can understand is huge for many. I did to an extent make up for it my junior and senior year after I transferred, but it's not the same.
Most countries' universities seem to work like the community college: it's near your high school, you go there and just study, the dorms for people from other cities are just cheap flat in the surrounding area, and you try to make your campus as small and focused on study as possible.
At least that's how it was in France, and my memories or universities are full of technical discoveries, amazing teachers and passionate friends. Not lifestyle changes, but intellectual ones.
The drinking games and parties, they stated at 16 and felt not very different at uni, just normal part of youth.
And so there is an explosion of exploration, and only some of it is intellectual.
It was my four year college, I thought it was a joke, and upper division class worse. I once had a accounting teacher sit at the front of the room, and read the text book word for word. He did tell us class participation was not expected.
That said, going to a community college can be depressing.
Something like 90% do not finish their General Education courses, and don't transfer to a four year. They just drop out.
No regrets at all and am grateful for the opportunity to rebound from a lousy HS freshmen year and still do well for myself.
K-12 is considered a baseline for society. Everyone is expected to have it. It absolutely makes sense for the government to pay for it.
Post-secondary is a different beast. It is not a baseline for society (Even if it is a baseline for white collar-work). Not everyone is expected to have it. People who end up in, on average, better-paying jobs are the primary beneficiaries of cheap/free post-secondary education.
There are two ways out of this situation.
1. You can make post-secondary the baseline. Everyone could be expected to have it. This... Is probably a good idea for building better citizens (and, by proxy, a better society), but it is not economically cost-optimal.
2. You can keep post-secondary as a special privilege for the a select few, citing that society, as a whole, benefits from educating its most capable members. In that case, you'd need hard admissions testing/filtering/etc, it should be easy to drop out if you can't perform once you've been admitted, and universities should primarily focus on education, rather than being a four-year, three-star resort for middle-class young people.
Neither of these two options would look anything like "College, as it is currently practiced in the United States, but paid for by the government."
That needs to stop
Those people also end up paying far more taxes. There's a perfectly selfish reason for government to make college free - it more than pays for itself over the lifetime of the taxpayer.
It doesn't make sense for government to pay for ridiculous university overhead (e.g. expensive new buildings, armies of worthless administrators, wildly overpaid athletic coaches, etc) but it's a no-brainer deal for government to pay fully for the real costs college degree. The key is to avoid paying for the non-education expenses.
If we can make a college degree only cost what it actually costs and not pay for all the cruft why does the government have to start paying it? You've solved the problem at that point.
Only a single payer system has the leverage to force the universities to decouple their cruft from their core educational expenses. And you're right! College tuition would probably be near-negligible if the cruft was removed, but my take at that point is why not just make it free, then?
The irony is we essentially already have this single payer system. Every college and university is dependent on federal financing for tuition. The federal government simply needs to use the power it already possesses. It's a lot like the federal government's refusal to negotiate drug prices, a wasted opportunity.
That's a pretty steadfast assertion. It's untrue, and we know that because higher education used to be affordable without a single payer system.
> The irony is we essentially already have this single payer system.
I'm not sure this is ironic so much as symptomatic. Blank checks lead to waste. Students on the hook for blank checks lead to what we have now.
> why not just make it free, then?
I can think of a couple of reasons. Nothing is free in this world, for one, and beyond that, I don't want to live in a world where I have to spend another 4 years of my life in school just to get a job because it's free and therefore expected of everyone. Those are pretty big reasons why not.
We don't know that it would've been affordable without public financing, but I would wager we'd be in the same boat now but with college entirely out of reach for most, instead of merely expensive.
> Nothing is free in this world, for one
Except college in at least six countries[1]
> I don't want to live in a world where I have to spend another 4 years of my life in school just to get a job because it's free and therefore expected of everyone
You don't have to do this. The world still needs field hands and other unskilled labor, and there are still skilled trades that pay quite well.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/08061...
The middle ground is the federal government starts admitting that it is footing the bill for higher education (it already is paying via loans). If the government's only option for recouping the money is via future tax revenue than there should be pressure to keep the cost per student low and expected future earnings high. Hopefully this would result in colleges offering cheap online classes, credit via exams, etc.
Not everybody needs / is fit for long studies so I don't think it should become the baseline. I still think it should be free to avoid preventing people who are but could not otherwise afford it from attending it.
If people are just doing it to get a job, well, why not set up and support trade schools instead?
If you do that, you severely limit social/economical mobility. Is that what you want?
Why would this limit social and economic mobility?
If it does limit social and economic mobility, does that mean our process for mobility is flawed? Does there need to be a reassessment of what is valuable in society? Are plumbers or mechanics "less valuable" than a business analyst or marketing professional? What about a hospice care worker or a grocer? Are we focusing on college degrees because of historical baggage? Should we have more courses in computer science or agriculture, or more courses in literature? More of all? Less of all?
Recall that social and economic mobility don't just go up, they go down too.
Can we look to countries like Germany that have healthy vocational and technical training programs?
And why would you think that I would want to severely limit social and economic mobility? What are you implying here? I don't get it.
One major problem today is that most bachelor's degrees are required but not sufficient for many not-particularly-socially-upward jobs. So go in debt to still not have mobility.
Likewise, there are loads of things which help society in general which we still hold individuals accountable for. Law-school and Med-school cost loads, but students take on loans for those; small businesses provide a huge portion of employment, but by-and-large the burden of debt (even small-business-advantaged loans) is taken on by owners and not society-at-large (COVID notwithstanding); having a huge selection of television, music, literature, and other media produced in the US is great for society (and is a huge reason for American soft-power worldwide), but the cost of funding nearly all this work is borne by businesses and not the taxpayer.
This isn't to say that certain things shouldn't be funded by the taxpayer. However, saying "This thing is good for all of society, and therefore should be subsidized by the taxpayer" doesn't really necessarily follow.
The burden of these things have exploded in recent years, there's no clear reason why anyone should pay for that immense increase.
In either of the first two cases, someone is paying the exorbitant prices. In my mind, the question is less "Should taxpayers help fund education" and more "Why is the cost of education such a burden to begin with".
Of course as a side effect this is reflected in the market, as individuals engaging in things they find virtuous are reflected in the market.
If you don't trust people to make decisions for the community, why not just let them all make decisions for themselves and nobody else? That would solve that problem, no?
For the topic at hand I don't think there's a good way around letting people pick what they want to study among what is available. I deeply believe they should be able to decide what they are going to study for themselves and be given the keys to take informed decisions. Nobody can know better than themselves what is best for them.
You still need to provide a sensible set of available curricula, and people don't individually have the power to decide which curricula should be available so you still need an informed group of people to decide on this, not individually. Obviously you'll probably have to close curricula which don't attract enough people so you'll have some bit of market deciding.
PS: Note how many folks on HN are making fun of Gender Studies course. This is a great signal for any young kid not to enter that course.
Are you indicting the paper or person or other?
I think many Americans would be offended if they woke up one day and their universities had stopped offering useless gender studies degrees.
I don't know why this is such a pervasive perspective, but it's really sad. This same logic extends to philosophy, theater, arts, psychology, sociology, and so many other disciplines. At which point, you're really just left with STEM, which seems to hint the preference is for trade schools (which do exist, but aren't favored). The loss of arts and social sciences would be a catastrophe for the academic world.
But we need poor people to operate the machinery. They shouldn't be allowed to dream, write poetry, or do anything that we consider frivolous. The frivolous things are for the privileged to do.
Sorry. My sarcasm couldn't be contained.
But a blessing for most students who need a job to pay their student debts after graduation. Sacrificing art students by taking their tuition knowing no or too few jobs exist is unacceptable. Keeping social sciences and art departments alive should require a source of money that does not create non-dischargeanle student debts and jobless students.
Software development, for example, very much falls under a trade, else there wouldn't be so many bootcamps that both feed into the industry and simultaneously take advantage of those who don't know better. There's no prestigious trade school that I'm aware of that produces consistently competent software developers. That's just one example, but I'd love to see more trade schools supported and elevated as a path to career employment.
MIT? At least, it was accused of being a trade school toward the beginning of its history:
> These reforms were largely a response to Walker's on-going defense of the Institute and its curriculum from outside accusations of overwork, poor writing, unapplicable skills, and status as a "mere" trade school.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Massachusetts_I...
These days, one might think of U Waterloo as filling the role of a prestigious trade school given the focus they put on their co-op program. Which I mean in a positive light, of course.
It also wasn't intended for middle class people of average intelligence. Consider, before WW2 only about 10% of people attended college. You either came from money or you were a rather bright person. Today it is an employment gateway. People mainly attend to "get a good job", not for the pursuit of higher knowledge and "finishing". For those of humble origins that want to use it to discover themselves or become an "intellectual", well enjoy the 100k debt while slinging lattes.
College education in USA is ridiculously cheap if you are not looking at top colleges. Plenty of universities in silicon valley which can give you a wide array of useful degrees for very affordable price. Affordable = You can pay your student loans within 2 years of gainful employment post degree.
The market might demand someone with experience in a certain field, but that doesn't mean that college is a useful way of preparing them for it.
Likewise, with the humanities I've learned much more outside of the University setting than inside of it. I never delved into primary sources or academic papers when I was an undergraduate, but often do both now that I'm out (as a hobby, not for work). I would say that I knew almost nothing about historiography coming out of college, and almost all my knowledge of it is from self-study after graduation.
People talk about the importance of discussions, but discussion groups I've had outside of university have been much more fruitful than inside - a group of people with ages ranging from teens to retirees, who've had a variety of life experiences and come from different countries is going to be a more varied discussion in my experience than a group of 19 year old college students.
I think people really have to start discussing what goals we're actually trying to achieve, if college is the best way of achieving, and what other alternatives might be available. In my experience, the college system is a pretty poor system that has survived as long as it has because of inertia.
I guess we can barely pay for the present nowadays, nevermind the future.
- Loosely speaking K-12 can be seen as a public good because of which it may make sense for the society to pay for other people's education. College education is not a public good in the same way because at any rate only few folks will go to college and it is immoral for the other people being forced to pay for college education of those kids. If college educated kids earn even more then it is even more immoral for poor people to pay for rich.
- Unlike K-12, college education involves specialization. A gender studies degree is worthless compared to say a nurse. But because education is free a lot of students might enroll in more and more worthless degrees. This will have great negative impact on productivity of US society. A lot of folks who do not have any productive skills, a lot of folks staying out of labour market in their crucial years. I will work at a local farm for a year rather than pursue some of the college degrees any days.
- When government pays for education it distorts the market. You can see it as a subsidy. But then it also means more and more worthless colleges which have more and more worthless degree programs that focus on "good life" for kids.
I always watch this video from time to time : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3-_r_t7AZU
The opposite of your specialization argument also applies. It costs $20,000-$40,000 to go through nursing school. It's hugely beneficial for society to have nurses, and we have a nursing shortage. Paying for nursing school means more nurses. On the other side, personally I'm in favor of there being a lot more people who have expertise in advanced non-STEM topics. The benefits are less obvious, but a well educated populace is far more desirable than a pile of folks educated just well enough to be useful as well.
Distorting the market is a problem, but just as high schools are public, I think increasing the number of public universities and public community colleges helps that problem. If there is enough high quality public education available, there's no need to subsidize private education.
that's covered in the video at around the 4 minute mark.
I think companies will live if people take a little longer to enter the workforce. If the tradeoff is a more educated populace and people spending less of their life toiling away vs. corporate profits maybe having a tiny decline then it's definitely worth it.
Because K-12 is paid for by the government.
Employers are not completely stupid, they notice the high school diploma is no longer signaling competency and start demanding university degrees for pretty basic jobs. We feel bad for people who can't get jobs, so we make it easier to get a university degree. You can see where this is headed.
Of course, this means you'll still be paying for college, as a taxpayer instead of as an attendee.
These feel like sadistic ways to punish people for being poor.
I personally find that even at a high income relative to the general populations a few drinks at the end of the day can absolutely better my life. If I was disenfranchised I can only imagine this would be even more true.
I would hope that if someone was giving money to disadvantaged people on my behalf that would also include the ability to buy themselves a drink or a joint in states where that's allowed.
It's everyone's best interest to make sure that they get on board of a better life as quickly as possible. You spread the money on multiple fronts, it just slows down and wastes the money.
For sure we can debate what's "essential" but I really don't think cigarettes and alchohols are among them, unless stapled by a medical doctor.
Taking agency away from them, by forbidding behavior you deem inappropriate.
The most effective programs are the conditional cash transfer ones and they are extremely successful in bootstrapping families out of poverty even in the poorest places of the poorest countries, right? For the Brazilian one I am most familiar with, it was estimated that for every dollar invested in it, 2.5 would return to the government as taxes in 10 years.
I think I read that we estimate about 1% (and that's at the upper range) of foodstamps/SNAP/EBT/etc are used for fraud. It's a pretty small number but I think a lot of people think it's much higher. We tend to over index on these things and forget to consider the 99% that are being used probably as intended.
In general, I think people can more efficiently allocate their money than a central government planning group can. If an aid recipient wants to buy cigarettes or a drink with it, that’s not what I’d choose, but if they’re going to, I want them to do so as efficiently as possible.
Let's look at it this way: Government just provides the essentials (what essentials consist of is to debate but still can be setup by an expert committee) and people can get whatever they want once they get a job (and thus reducing the aid they need).
Because some things won't be deemed essential. And now someone has to arbitrate that. And so the government is now making decisions about where you are allowed to live. What constitutes essential housing? Are you allowed to live in non-essential housing and "top up" or do you get stuck with what the expert committee has decided?
We have government-owned public housing in my country, and it has many flaws, in practice. Long wait-lists to get an apartment, no choice of where your apartment is, and little in the way of power to act should you need to move or have something fixed.
If they were given cash equivalent to the value of that housing on the market (a program we've been shifting towards but which lacks funding) then they can rent a house where they need it. Got a job? Move. Landlord is neglectful? Well, at the very least you can probably move.
There's a middle ground, of course. In the case of housing in particular, it might be reasonable to mandate a proportion of social assistance cash payments be spent on rent, should a person end up interacting with homelessness services. (But this is of course assuming you actually can rent anything with that... sometimes not.)
One issue we see here in Ireland is that there seems to be no path to create laws that force land developers to allocate sufficient space to affordable (they read "affordable" as "less profitable") housing. Since they have pockets deep enough to help their friends get elected, there is not much surprise such things tend to not happen. Ireland's ranked voting system is great for weeding out extremism, but doesn't work as well for preventing regulatory capture.
Here's something to consider: Nicotine alleviates the symptoms of schizophrenia which affects 1% of the population. https://www.brainfacts.org/archives/2008/smoking-and-schizop...
So put yourself in their shoes. They need financial aid because their mind is broken. One of the few things that calms the screaming voices is a cigarette. Nicotine acts on the brain in various ways and it literally alleviates the symptoms of a severe disease.
So yes they need financial aid but it's really arrogant that you're so sure you know better than them on how to spend it. You're also not giving them a learning experience. Remember that the goal is for them to dig themselves out of their hole. By not allowing them to succeed or fail you aren't setting them up for the day they are financially independent.
With this in mind you can look back at all the judgements made on the mentally ill. It's common for people to think "Why are they buying cigarettes if they don't have a home!".
Turns out that viewpoint was wrong all along. The ability to think at all is indeed a top priority, perhaps higher than housing or food. It turns out that the crazy person using money they receive to buy smokes wasn't making poor choices after all. They were doing the one thing that gave them a chance at clarity of thought. Understandable. Yet we were judging the way they spent their money the whole time. We were wrong and we should take that lesson and continue calling out overly simplistic viewpoints along the lines of what you said above.
I know this because it has been explained to me in detail by my wife, who is a case worker at the county welfare office.
Then you'll just get for-profit colleges to pop up (like Devry, etc)
Financial aid offers so much more than tuition coverage. I don't see how any list of specific benefits could come close to doing as much for allowing a student to feel financially secure.
Aside from being fraud it's also incredibly stupid from a long-term financial stability standpoint. Student loans cannot be discharged in bankruptcy and they are there until you pay them in full. You're better off putting your car repairs on a credit card and paying a higher interest rate if the alternative is "the only way out of this $2,000 bill is that you die."
What!? No!
You're willing to pay often 25% interest on a credit card on the off chance you need to file for bankruptcy?
(That is, assuming its not fraud, of course)
How do you think people pay rent, feed themselves, buy textbooks, etc, while in school? You just aren’t aware how financial aid works
So students typically work jobs, use savings, get help from friends and family.
[0] https://www.salliemae.com/blog/what-to-use-student-loans-for...
>Otherwise, use your leftover student loan money for anything you absolutely need for school.
>Ultimately, any leftover loan money is yours to use how you’d like.
This article is merely a shitty low quality advice article, these are suggestions.
Have you put any thought into why that isn't the way its done?
Of course, if you bought your room and board from your college there would be little to no money leftover after tuition and fees were paid.
Source: Personal experience.
In actuality, the bookstore had not only books but a good 700sqft of CDs (yes, this is a while ago...), clothing, memorabilia, food, junkfood, etc.
You could also have the Bursar disburse cash straight to your account for off-campus rent or food. How you spent it was up to you. Several students I know put it right into the then-roaring late-90s stock market.
Not saying this is the right thing to do, but thats how it was
Whatever financial aid you receive is paid to you as the student, as a literal check, once the cost of attendance is paid to the institution. You can then use that money to pay for whatever you want. Some low-income students actually get paid to go to community college because of PELL and state aid packages, even without loans.
Google, "Financial Aid Refund".
> Student loans are intended to pay for college, but education costs include more than tuition. You can also use student loans for living expenses. You’re limited to borrowing the school’s cost of attendance — that’s tuition and fees, books and supplies, room and board, transportation, and personal expenses —minus any aid you receive.
In other words, once you've paid tuition the balance is yours to do whatever you want/need to continue as a student, including paying rent or fixing your car. After all, barriers to poor people attending college go far beyond just the cost of tuition.
[1] https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/student-loans/stude...
If you're wondering how this works, financial aid and student loans are distributed to your school, tuition and fees are paid, and then you request the school distributes the rest to your bank account. I did this is college, it's totally and completely normal. No everyone's parents are willing and able to just pay for their kids living expenses.
When I was in undergrad (granted, 20+ years ago) part of my aid was a couple thousand a year in direct cash payments to me. There were no restrictions whatsoever on this money.
During my time I had to routinely apply for student loans every year to cover housing, food, and other living expenses and it made sense because unless I was doing an internship the next semester - I wouldn't be able to make any payments until I was done with school and had a full time job.
Was able to consolidate and refinance all my private loans to a variable 4.5% back in late 2019 and since then has gone to 2.48% which is now less than my mortgage interest rate. Leveraging student loans for financial flexibility opened the doors for me to live a great life during some super chaotic but fun years.
however TAG does not confer eligibility into a number of STEM (and STEM-adjacent, like medicine) programs within many highly competitive departments at the UC system.
For example the neuroscience programs at UCSD do not automatically accept TAG applicants, you have to be qualified by the program's own rubric regardless of securing a TAG spot for the school itself.
Once you complete your lower division prerequisites passably (typically after two or so years), you can then declare your major as a CS degree.
This isn't the case for College of Engineering which houses the EECS program (while sharing the same department as CS, confusing I know), wherein admissions are more selective, but you don't need to declare your major. You also have the advantage of already being in the program, which helps with registering for courses (especially upper-division courses, which typically only have a small number of slots reserved for non-majors).
Oregon students: $130 per credit ($96 tuition + $34 universal fee)
Online students: $130 per credit ($96 tuition + $34 universal fee)
Out-of-state students: $295 per credit ($261 tuition + $34 universal fee)
Some classes have additional fees…
Even certifications are free or as cheap as a few hundreds of dollars. The true problem comes from GATE KEEPED professions where the common people shouldn’t be involved. Think Pharma / Medicine / etc
Well we all know what they'd be happy to tell us if they didn't. So by process of elimination...
I'd also be willing to bet that other state systems would find similar situations if they checked their rolls, like you said.
You might be correct. The obvious idea is that it's more difficult to identify the phantom students if everything is virtual.
That being said, where I teach, we have a system (both for on-ground and on-line) where you have to complete at least one non-trivial assignment (usually a quiz) within the first 2 weeks of the semester. If you don't complete the quiz (or whatever), you are dropped from the course and the loans are not fully released.
I imagine our policy was in response to "phantom" students abusing the loan system. But our policy has been in place for at least 10 years so the scam has been afoot for a while.
sentences like
> finding that 20% of recent traffic on its main portal for online applications was “malicious and bot-related,”
> the fake applications are roiling the ability of college officials to determine true student enrollment numbers
Fake enrollment is done, for another reason, to harvest .edu emails. There are websites that easily allow you to get such an address, that works to get some student perks (some websites giving student perks intentionally block certain community college domains, because they understood long ago the fraud going on). There are scripts to automate this (including DOB, they're complaining about 90 year olds signing up) on Github
The harvesters then go and sell the accounts on eBay openly
So I suspect this might be a subset of the fake sign ups, and they aren't really explaining how many of the suspected 20% bots actually officially filed for financial aid
Here is an example of such a Github repo
https://github.com/MrStark-XD/Edu-Mail-Generator
Use at your own risk, it literally just signs you up to community college with random information
The only recourse you have at that point is to shut down the accounts and hope they haven't drained it completely. And that's if everyone is willing to play ball, there are countless bureaucrats in this process that can slow or stop it because it's extra work and they feel like their job isn't on the line if they ignore the request.
It looks like banks need to be better regulated. This seems to be a solution to this and a whole lot other problems.
Will Real ID help with identity theft and fraud?
I mean in practical terms. I'm just so ignorant about this stuff. But I'd like to know what reforms I should advocate.
* Money mules send the money out of country.
In my state a reply like this will generate a sunshine request faster than you can bat an eye.
Edit: The SSN seems a lot like JavaScript at this point. Y'all are talking about how you would never use it for anything and yet it's the one thing everyone is using for identity verification these days.
A previous comment I wrote on this topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28280851
Someone in the trenches wrote about it: https://billhunt.dev/blog/2020/12/18/federal-policy-recs/#4-...
"It wasn't meant for this, it wasn't built for it, it's not used in a consistent way that we could do that, and I'm not sure you want the Social Security administration to be in charge of that, that's not what we even do..."
I keep poking government agencies who don't support it. Some are easier, some are harder. Some I have to go talk to legislators about appropriations to extend their applications to include the support. A necessary schlep.
If I saw that someone printed a form with their SSN on the office printer and forgot to pick it up, I'd just set it aside without a second thought, because it just isn't something that makes one think "red alarm fire".
Contrast this with something like a private key, which never leaves your possession and is never shared directly, just used for signing. Unfortunately most non-technical people have no concept of such a thing, apart from...stamps and seals? The chip on a credit card might count, but it doesn't seem like people care about losing possession of that too much either.
So, consider how Apple is about to handle state IDs and driver's licenses with iOS 15. It's what you describe, mostly. Not a private key, but identity built on crypto, with a UX that doesn't suck. We're getting there.
https://9to5mac.com/2021/07/27/ios-15-apple-implementing-sec...
I hate how businesses trust it as sort of some password. It's ridiculous how much damage a scammer can do by using your SSN.
Like it's a freaking plain text number. At this point it really should not be used for anything at all, and we should just assume that our SSN is public knowledge. I think we have the technology and means to come up with something better.
This always comes up with identification requirements for voting. It seems superficially reasonable to require them, especially if you are looking at it from abroad, or if you are pretty young. But the fact is that within living memory many American states had local policies of not recording the births of black people, and to this day there are many living black people who can't prove their own citizenship.
Unless and until every one of the fifty US states can demonstrate that they've put an ID card in the hands of virtually everybody, it won't be reasonable to condition things like education, health care, or voting on the possession of one.
Today the coverage of state IDs is actually very poor. People who hold them believe they are universally held but in truth only 89% of adult Americans possess one. That is not high, it is terrible.
(a component of my work is digital identity/IAM)
Anyway I'm not saying such a system is impossible. I am saying that you'd have to order it such that the requirement for presenting the national ID was not triggered until universality was achieved. I will add that there are abundant forces in national, state, and local politics who would fight universal national ID systems, which would range from deranged Libertarians to classic racial vote suppressors who support ID requirements but who at the same time fight against actually issuing IDs.
So you're saying we won't therefore we shouldn't try? Somehow the Austrians and Hungarians and various Yugoslav republics and Latvia and Poland and Switzerland and basically every country in eastern and southern europe all can keep track of the people born within their borders even as the borders shifted but the US can't tell a black american? It just sounds like a very very weak argument to me.
If you want to know why Latvia has national ID cards and America doesn't, just imagine if there was a venue where Montenegro could sue Latvia to stop it from having them. That's the American system!
It seems like you havent thought this through well enough. How do the people you metion do other things in life, like get a driver's license, employment, or a bank account?
Besides, if they can't prove their identity today, what would change for them when others get a new id card? Those people wouldn't be impacted.
Yes. But, you don't need to repeat yourself in every post. The point I stated, which you glossed over, is that the people who do not have licenses today will not be at a further loss, when others obtain a national identification. How will today's unlicensed people be harmed when a national id is created?
You still haven't explained what the harm would be. Nobody who can get an education now would suddenly not be able to get one.
Great! You have just solved the illegal immigration problem. So we are going to legalize everyone right here right now, correct?
They are exactly the same issue.
National ID only works if everyone inside the border has it -- regardless of how they managed to get there initially -- be that a person who due to whatever the weird way cannot get an ID as their records are messed up ( hello rural Appalachia ) or someone who is here illegally. After that t0 day the borders control and immigration control get teeth and anyone who does not have a National ID gets removed from the country.
Otherwise you have just created two different classes of people with a near impenetrable barrier between them
It does not because we fundamentally have enough fake social security numbers based identify theft to still create a two class system except this time there's zero guarantee that the person who should get the ID will have it and not his or hers "counterpart"
My wife got IRS notification that she already filed taxes a few years ago when she attempted to file hers. It was because someone has been using her identity. That person did not get arrested. Rather there are now two people running around the country with her SSN - her and not her. Oh and they are still filing taxes as her. Year after year. She just needs to use a special code now to separate her return from an imposer return
> anyone who does not have a National ID gets removed from the country.
From what can tell you inadvertently already solved the problem you're proposing.
Of course you framed the problem wrong. National ID only works if everyone who is supposed to be inside the border has it. It doesn't work if Appalachians can't get it. But it works like a charm if illegal aliens can't.
Obviously there are a number of potential pitfalls in any such system, but I have to believe that even a flawed system which was intentionally designed would be harder to exploit than a hodgepodge of 100 incidental systems.
The problem seems to be that American ID is extremely valuable; it will suffer more attacks than almost any other national ID, just because of the sheer amount of money involved.
Some easy improvements even keeping a number based system would be:
1) don't assign ID numbers sequentially and based on location of birth
2) have consistent laws about who can collect these and liability for leaks (like hipaa)
3) allow them to be changed in cases of theft
But we could actually do much better by using asymmetric cryptography.
In slovenia (and other former yugoslav countries) we have a unique ID for every person here.. It's set up from the date of birth (0101021 - 1. jan. 2021), then two digits for the foreign yugoslav state (50 for slovenia), then a tri-digit counter for each birth (first person born that day is 001, and so on), and one digit for the checksum, which can be easily calculated.... so basically, with a calculator and 2 minutes of typing in the numbers, you can calculate a valid ID number.
But to open a bank account, you show the ID, which has any-copying measures (like money has), a photo, a serial number (to be cancelled if stolen), and only then the bank creates a new bank account for you. You can also use the same card to buy alcohol and travel through many european countries (no need for a passport).
If we severely punish a bank that looks the other way while someone opens an account using a stolen identity, I am very sure they'll work really hard to make that impossible. How hard they'll work depends on how severely they are punished.
You're treated like a criminal simply by doing business in cash or having a lot of cash. Enhanced KYC just means that banks capriciously terminate your accounts and services if they find out you're a sex worker. If you're living abroad, no one wants to let you open an account.
are you saying this because of onlyfans? AFAIK that was due to pressure from banks/payment processors themselves (ie. not wanting the PR associated with facilitating human trafficking or whatever), not due to compliance reasons.
When I say banks need to be better regulated I don't mean they need to have more insane rules, but that they do whatever is possible for them to a) prevent someone from opening an account pretending to be someone else and b) are forbidden to deny service to someone who checks all boxes except their hypocritical morality rules.
The solution for this problem is to make community college tuition zero. And build a lot more of them. Combine this with a reduction of government grants and student loans and we'll eliminate fraud and people getting into debt they can't pay--while still providing good education options for people without a lot of money.
Now ofc poorer students have grants they can abuse for rent and food, and they do. But it's not the same amounts and can be distributed regularly along the year instead of in bulk.
And studying in a small french uni, I found that "quality education" is mostly giving you time away from distraction to learn a craft, and the uni is a guide/facilitator, but you're doing the ground work. A terrible teacher can still nudge you towards the right books and focus your studies with exams and you can always compensate for their lack of clarity.
Edit: guys... it's literally true. Come on https://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2021/06/28/international-fra....