Who is responsible for stopping a fraudulent student?

It’s a deceptively simple question. Ask it across campus and you’ll likely get a dozen different answers. Admissions might point to application review. Financial aid may focus on eligibility verification. IT owns identity management. The registrar manages enrollment records. Finance oversees disbursements and refunds.

The problem is that every one of those answers is technically correct.

And that’s exactly why higher education is struggling with student fraud.

Too often, institutions approach fraudulent enrollment as a people problem. Someone missed a signal. A process wasn’t followed. A review didn’t happen.

But what if everyone did their job?

As one presenter at the Spring Higher Education CIO Congress put it: if every team followed its process and fraud still occurred, the issue isn’t with the people—it’s with the design of the system.

The reality is that modern student fraud isn’t a single event. It’s a workflow.

Fraudulent actors use fabricated or stolen identities to navigate the admissions process, create legitimate-looking student records, enroll in courses, receive financial aid, and ultimately access institutional resources. Once an identity is established, every downstream system inherits the trust of the one before it.

That creates a dangerous assumption: if a student made it this far, someone else must have already validated them.

The result is what many institutions are now experiencing—a visibility gap.

Admissions sees one part of the story. Financial aid sees another. IT manages accounts and access. The registrar tracks enrollment. Finance handles refunds. Each department performs its role effectively, but no single team has visibility across the entire fraud pathway.

In other words, every system works.

No one sees the pattern.

This is why fraud has become increasingly difficult to combat through traditional controls alone. The challenge isn’t necessarily a technology failure. It’s an organizational one. Institutions have built processes around functional ownership while attackers exploit the spaces between them.

Perhaps the most important takeaway is that fraud doesn’t target institution types—it targets workflows.

While community colleges often dominate headlines, exposure is less about institutional classification and more about operational conditions. Attackers look for frictionless pathways, disconnected systems, and opportunities to exploit trust handoffs between departments.

For CIOs and campus leaders, the conversation may need to shift.

The question isn’t whether admissions, financial aid, IT, or finance are doing their jobs.

It’s whether the institution has designed a process that allows those teams to see the same story.

Because today’s fraud problem isn’t simply about fake students.

It’s about sophisticated operations that manufacture them.