Many students enter community college with the intent to transfer to a university. To complete an associate’s degree, students must dedicate countless hours to classes, homework, and counseling sessions.

People say “C’s get degrees,” but higher-level universities require higher GPAs. With the help of a drop-in counselor, we created an education plan that I needed to move on to a four-year university.

Through this counselor, I also learned which grades I needed to get to progress to the next level. With this knowledge, I started to have specific universities in mind, hoping and trusting that someday my hard work would get me to where I want to go.

With the amount of work I have put into my time at El Camino College, I thought the only thing that could stop me from reaching my goals was bad grades.

I never imagined that one of the biggest obstacles to achieving my goals would be fraudulent students stealing spots in the courses that I needed.

When class registration opened, I was surprised to see the seats filling up so quickly.

I was barely able to squeeze into a required course this winter session. Come spring, my last semester before I graduate, I struggled to build my class schedule.

The class filled up early and quickly, and it was difficult to organize a schedule that aligned with my work and social life.

Somehow, I managed to get into most of my classes, except for one.

Anthropology 4 was the last class I needed to get into my dream school, the University of California, Los Angeles, and I couldn’t even be waitlisted for it.

My counselor told me it was not available at ECC, but I could apply to a few other Los Angeles Community Colleges where this class was still available.

She also suggested I wait to see if people dropped the class after the last day to pay, but I knew it wasn’t guaranteed I’d get in.

Instead, I took her first piece of advice and enrolled in Los Angeles Harbor College, hoping that I would be accepted in enough time to get into the anthropology class I needed.

I was accepted within one day and was able to get into the anthropology class that I desperately needed.

Back at ECC, I was informed by the anthropology professor, Marianne Waters, that seats were suddenly available just days before the class started. This was puzzling, as there wasn’t even a waitlist opportunity a month before.

I wondered if this had to do with the ongoing fraudulent enrollment problem at ECC, and she confirmed that that was the case for her class.

This breaks my heart for students like myself with big dreams dependent on education and for the professors who are passionate about educating.

This is the reality of being a student during these times, and extreme measures need to be put in place to fix this issue.

Education is powerful. It can lead to potentially great job opportunities that can change someone’s life.

It would be a shame for this potential to be taken away by fraudulent students.