Exposed: How Community College Bureaucrats In NC Are Scamming Students—And Getting Rich Doing It

She’s never taught a class. She doesn’t know your name. But, she cashes a check of ever student wo clicks ‘Submit’. Welcome to the new face of Community Colleges in North Carolina: bloated, automated, and proudly disconnected.

It started with bots.

Scam rings—often overseas—figured out they could flood community college systems with fake students, enroll them in online courses, and pocket federal financial aid money before anyone noticed. It was low-risk, high-reward, and perfectly suited to the post-COVID world of remote learning and automated class management.

But the real scandal isn’t the bots.

The real scandal is that college administrators saw this happening—and realized they could do the exact same thing.

Not with fake identities, but with fake education. Courses with no instructors. Degrees delivered through auto-graded quizzes and Coursera links. Zoom classrooms where the professor is a ghost, and “attendance” means replying to a discussion board once a week.

All while charging full tuition and cashing in on federal funding.

At the center of it all? Wake Technical Community College in North Carolina, a case study in how the community college system has been hijacked—by bloated administrations, absentee instructors, and a culture that treats students as data points in a spreadsheet.

The Scam Isn't Just Bots—It's the Bureaucracy

Yes, scammer bots are flooding online systems. Yes, they’re grabbing financial aid and vanishing. But here’s the real scandal: administrators know it, and instead of fixing it, they’ve learned to profit from it.

Every fake enrollment pads the numbers. Every online “student”—bot or real—justifies more funding. And that funding feeds the monster: swelling administrative departments, DEI consultants, student success managers, and digital operations teams that grow while in-person classes die on the vine.

Students at Wake Tech Deserve Better

Ask real students at Wake Technical Community College, and they’ll tell you the same thing: the classrooms are empty, the support is thin, and the “education” often consists of recycled Coursera links, PDFs, and auto-graded quizzes.

“I’m in the IT and Programming track at Wake Tech, and I’ve been lucky to get even one in-person class,” one student said. “Meanwhile, there are ten or more online sections that feel like you’re just clicking through slides on your own. With a technical education, you don’t just need to interact with code — you need real-time discussion, mentorship, and hands-on troubleshooting.”

And it’s not just tech. Even foundational science courses have been shoved into Zoom oblivion.

“I’m planning to transfer to North Carolina State University, and I can’t even get a seated biology class,” said another Wake Tech student. “Biology isn’t just theory — it’s hands-on. Watching a dissection on video and clicking ‘next’ doesn’t cut it. But that’s what’s being passed off as college science in North Carolina now.”

These aren’t electives. These are gateway courses for healthcare, engineering, biotech — careers where virtual experience isn’t enough. But colleges have decided that mediocrity scales better than excellence.

From Emergency Remote Learning to Permanent Decline

What started as a necessary emergency response during COVID has now calcified into a permanent downgrade of education—especially in the North Carolina community college system. Seated classes were canceled out of public health necessity. But years later, many have never returned.

At Wake Technical Community College, like many others across the country, administration saw the pandemic not just as a crisis—but as an opportunity. Online learning was cheap. Scalable. Convenient—for them.

So instead of rebuilding the vibrant classroom experience students once relied on, they doubled down on virtual everything. And the result has been devastating.

“I first enrolled at Wake Tech back in 2020 during COVID, and I understood that everything had to be online for a while,” said one returning student now re-enrolled in a health sciences program. “But I came back in 2024 expecting things to be normal again—and it’s worse. There are even fewer seated classes than before. It’s like they realized they could run an entire degree off a website and still charge full tuition. The labs are gone. The instructors barely show up. And students like me are paying the price.”

This shift isn’t limited to one program. Across technical, healthcare, and STEM tracks, online-only delivery has become the lazy default—not because it works for students, but because it works for administrators padding their budgets and minimizing costs.

Faculty Silenced, Instruction Outsourced

The erosion of educational quality at Wake Tech and throughout the North Carolina community college system hasn’t gone unnoticed by those who once tried to uphold it: the faculty.

One former professor, who was let go during the administrative push to expand online offerings, described a system designed not to teach, but to simulate the appearance of instruction just enough to justify full tuition and federal aid.

“I was replaced by a rotating lineup of adjuncts who didn’t even live in North Carolina,” the former instructor said. “Their job wasn’t to teach — it was to take attendance, which in the online world just means making sure a student replies to a discussion board post once a week. That’s it. That’s what counts as participation.”

“The rest of the course? A textbook, maybe a few handouts, and a silent message: sink or swim. No lectures. No support. No mentorship. The administration knew exactly what was happening. They were milking the students and the taxpayers, and those adjuncts were complicit. Everyone was cashing in, except the students.”

This isn’t just academic erosion. It’s systemic fraud, wrapped in credentials, fueled by state subsidies, and rubber-stamped by college bureaucracies more concerned with enrollment dashboards than education.

And let’s be clear: this is no accident.

The administrators know.
The adjuncts know.
The students sure as hell know.

They’ve all been handed the same silent message:
“Give us your tuition, don’t expect real instruction, and don’t ask questions.”

This Is the Real Fraud

Scammer bots may be stealing financial aid, but it’s the administrators who are scamming students. They’ve built a system that rewards enrollment over education, growth over outcomes, and bureaucracy over teaching. And they’re doing it in plain sight—backed by taxpayer money.

They’ve turned Wake Technical Community College—and community colleges across North Carolina and the nation—into diploma-flavored vending machines, staffed by invisible instructors and managed by six-figure suits who haven’t stepped foot in a classroom in years.

This is no longer about access.
It’s not about equity.
It’s about money.
And everyone’s cashing in—except the students.

What Needs to Change

• Restore seated courses as the default for technical, lab-based, and foundational education

• Audit administrative spending and cap overhead growth

• Require transparency on how much tuition goes to instruction vs. administration

• Mandate that all degree programs include real, instructor-led engagement

• End the financial incentive to replace teaching with bureaucracy

🔥 The Scorched Earth Close

So let’s call this what it is:

The administration at Wake Technical Community College—and too many others like it—aren’t just failing students. They’re exploiting them.

They’ve gutted real education, outsourced instruction to ghost adjuncts, and turned federal aid into a slush fund for bloated departments and six-figure salaries.

This isn’t reform. This is academic racketeering.

And while real students drown in silence, these so-called “leaders” sit in their Zoom meetings, cashing checks off the backs of kids who will never even know their names.

If you’re still calling this education, then you’ve forgotten what education is supposed to be.

Wake Tech, you shold be ashamed of yourself.