The Brief

It has been more than two years since the release of ChatGPT created widespread dismay over generative AI’s threat to academic integrity. Why would students write anything themselves, instructors wondered, if a chatbot could do it for them? Indeed, many students have taken the bait, if not to write entire essays, then certainly to draft an outline, refine their ideas or clean up their writing before submitting it.

And as faculty members grapple with what this means for grading, tech companies have proved yet again that there’s money to be made from panic. Turnitin, a longtime leader in the plagiarism-detection market, released a new tool within six months of ChatGPT’s debut to identify AI-generated writing in students’ assignments. In 2025 alone, records show the California State University system collectively paid an extra $163,000 for it, pushing total spending this year to over $1.1 million. Most of these campuses have licensed Turnitin’s plagiarism detector since 2014.

That detector first became popular among professors when the internet made it easy for students to copy and paste information from websites into their assignments. In the AI detector, faculty members sought both a way to discourage students from using ChatGPT on their homework and a way to identify the AI-generated writing when they saw it.

But the technology offers only a shadow of accurate detection: It highlights any matching text, whether properly cited or not; it flags everything that mirrors AI’s writing style, whether a student used AI inappropriately or not. And Turnitin licenses this technology to colleges while demanding “perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable and sublicensable” rights to student writing. The company has used these rights to build a massive database of student papers, which it uses to market the superiority of its existing products as well as build new ones, including the AI detector. Turnitin has become so valuable that in 2019 Advance Publications paid $1.75 billion to acquire it, more than the total amount raised by all ed-tech startups the prior year, EdSurge noted at the time.

To understand the full range of consequences stemming from Turnitin’s place in higher education, CalMatters and The Markup interviewed dozens of students, faculty members and administrators across the state and obtained Turnitin purchase orders documenting the amount paid over time by approximately 60 colleges there. This investigation revealed institutions willing to renew Turnitin subscriptions year after year despite the cost, faulty technology and concerns about privacy and intellectual property raised by the company’s ever-expanding database of papers.

Turnitin tries to make the gray area of academic dishonesty into something black-and-white, and many faculty members drive demand, searching for the promise of algorithmic accuracy. But honest students are caught in the crossfire of an arms race between technology that mimics human speech and technology that claims to identify it.

The rise of Turnitin

In 2004 Wendy Brill-Wynkoop, a photography professor at College of the Canyons, chaired her campus’s technology committee. She became one of the first Turnitin users at the large community college north of Los Angeles, testing out the software before campuswide adoption. Purchasing records obtained by CalMatters and The Markup show Brill-Wynkoop’s license cost just $120 in 2004. The following year, College of the Canyons paid 75 cents per student and less than $6,500 total to make the tool available to all faculty members for as many papers as they wanted to scan. This year, the college paid almost $47,000.

As teaching and learning increasingly shifted online throughout the early 2000s and 2010s, Turnitin became more embedded in classes. College of the Canyons, like many institutions, paid extra to integrate the plagiarism checker into its online learning management system, where faculty members had begun to post assignments and reading materials and students were expected to submit their papers. Turnitin’s default settings, once integrated, are to scan every assignment, not just those that professors suspect are plagiarized. Besides accelerating the growth of the company’s student-paper database, this puts the tool in front of faculty members who otherwise wouldn’t have used it.

The Turnitin similarity score of a student essay in one of Adam Kaiserman’s classes at College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita on May 6, 2025.

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Jules Hotz

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CalMatters

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In fact, Brill-Wynkoop had largely stopped using Turnitin to check student work after a few years. “If I had a student who I suspected wasn’t using their own words, I’d pop the phrase into Google and then could just show them,” she said. “I wouldn’t have gone back to [Turnitin].” But since her college built it into the system she was already using to read student papers, she found herself checking the automated reports again.

When the pandemic shut down in-person instruction on campuses nationwide in 2020, fresh anxiety over academic integrity created another windfall for Turnitin. The GovSpend database of government-purchasing records shows a nationwide spike in Turnitin contracts during the 2020-21 school year. And in California, at least, many colleges processed more cheating accusations that year, too, according to academic dishonesty case counts obtained by The Markup and CalMatters via public-records requests. Those case counts dropped — sometimes precipitously — with the return to in-person learning but climbed again when the release of ChatGPT gave Turnitin its next crisis to monetize.

This year’s $47,000 contract with Turnitin for plagiarism and AI detection pushed the total spent by College of the Canyons to over half a million dollars.

Turnitin executives did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story. Worldwide, the company licenses its software to more than 16,000 institutions that cumulatively enroll over 71 million students. Almost three-quarters of California community colleges now use it, as does the entire California State University system, except Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Cal Poly canceled its contract last year saying not enough faculty used Turnitin to justify the cost, but not before it spent $171,000 on the detectors from 2020 to 2024. Cal State campuses have spent a combined $6 million on Turnitin since 2019 alone, according to records obtained by CalMatters and The Markup. Several University of California campuses spend more than $100,000 per year on the detector, which Turnitin licenses for a per-student fee.

As part of this investigation, CalMatters and The Markup tracked down more than $15 million in purchases of Turnitin plagiarism-prevention software across 57 institutions. Of course, since California is home to 149 public colleges and universities, this amount represents just a fraction of the total spending statewide. And while College of the Canyons released 21 years of receipts, most campuses shared only three to seven.

Robbie Torney is the senior director of AI programs at Common Sense Media, a national nonprofit headquartered in San Francisco that does research and advocacy work around how young people use technology. He said $15 million is a lot of money to spend on a tool with such limited value. He pointed to troubling reports of Turnitin erroneously flagging student writing as AI-generated and equally troubling accounts of students using simple workarounds to undermine the AI detectors.

“It’s probably better to invest in training for professors and teachers,” Torney said, “and also creating some frameworks for universities to message to students how they can and can’t use AI, rather than trying to use a surveillance methodology to detect AI in student writing.”

Yet many faculty members still want the tool, and colleges have continued paying for it year after year. Records show the Los Rios Community College District, in the Sacramento area, has paid almost $750,000 since 2018 to license Turnitin’s antiplagiarism software. In the Los Angeles Community College District, this year’s license alone cost $265,000. And UC Berkeley is just a few years into a 10-year, nearly $1.2-million contract of its own.

Amassing student papers

Turnitin helps convince college leaders to buy its tools by arguing it knows student writing better than any other company in the world. It has been making this case for decades by pointing to the size of its database, regularly updating its website with the latest student-paper count — 1.9 billion as of June 2025.

Brill-Wynkoop heard the same pitch back in the early 2000s: Instructors could catch a student turning in a peer’s paper from a previous semester with Turnitin. But the company doesn’t need to keep papers for decades to accomplish this.

The Community College League of California signed an agreement in 2016 with a company called VeriCite, locking in pricing for any of the state’s 116 community colleges that wanted its plagiarism-prevention software. VeriCite also claimed to help colleges catch students turning in their peers’ papers. But the tool only made student papers searchable to faculty members on campuses covered by the contract, and it gave them a chance to opt out of letting VeriCite pool their students’ work. The company claimed no rights to student intellectual property or copyright over their work.

After Turnitin bought the company in 2018, a new set of terms and conditions took effect: Now student papers go into Turnitin’s global database and the company maintains a perpetual, royalty-free license over all of them.

When Turnitin acquired another plagiarism-detection company, Unicheck, in 2020, the El Camino College student newspaper reported that the institution switched vendors rather than put up with Turnitin’s contract terms. Still, the vast majority of colleges and universities across California continue to hand over student writing to Turnitin in the name of plagiarism prevention.

Students’ cell phones are laid out on a table by the door in Adam Kaiserman’s English class at College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita.

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Jules Hotz

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CalMatters

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Students take notes during Adam Kaiserman’s English class at College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita on May 6, 2025.

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Jules Hotz

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CalMatters

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Jesse Stommel, an associate professor at the University of Denver, started speaking out about the company’s database of student papers in 2011, when he discovered his dissertation was in it. As a writing instructor, he takes issue with schools unquestioningly handing over original student work to a for-profit company.

In his syllabus, where the university requires him to include a statement about Turnitin, Stommel tells students, “It is my commitment to you that I will not submit any of your work to Turnitin. Plagiarism-detection software like Turnitin monetizes student intellectual property and contributes to a culture of suspicion in education. I trust you. I trust that your work is your own.” He then encourages students to ask him if they have questions about how to properly cite sources and directs them to an essay he co-wrote if they want to learn more about Turnitin or how to protect their intellectual property.

Students have protested Turnitin use too. An undergrad at McGill University, in Canada, failed multiple assignments in 2003 after refusing to submit them to Turnitin. He appealed to the university administration, ultimately winning the right to have his papers graded without the technology.

In 2007, high schoolers in Virginia and Arizona sued iParadigms, Turnitin’s parent company at the time, arguing that its database violated their copyright over their own writing. The courts disagreed. The students also lost on appeal, but some colleges still warn their faculty against using free online plagiarism checkers because of privacy concerns inherent in handing student work over to third-party companies.

Turnitin says it doesn’t “monetize” student writing, per se, but it has raised its prices since releasing an AI detector, which the company developed using that writing.

Brill-Wynkoop said she and her colleagues never thought that the student-paper database could one day become a source of profit for Turnitin. “That makes me feel bad as a faculty member, that I encouraged my students to use something, and now, I don’t know,” she said. “None of us thought about big data and how it would be used in the future.”

Students listen and take notes during Adam Kaiserman’s English class at College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita on May 6, 2025.

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‘Caught in the middle’

For today’s undergraduates, routine surveillance and violations of privacy are an unavoidable part of college life. Emily Ibarra, who just finished her second year at Cal State Northridge, said she has never even used ChatGPT. Yet, like all students on her campus and many millions more across the country, she has to deal with the consequences of widespread suspicion about her generation’s integrity.

“That culture is getting normalized here, of professors being able to take the furthest lengths possible to make sure [students aren’t cheating],” she said. “It kind of makes you feel defeated before you even start.”

When Ibarra started college, she panicked at the sight of her first Turnitin “similarity report.” Some faculty members let students see the reports as soon as they turn in their assignments, while others show students the reports only if they want to discuss a problem.

A screenshot of a Turnitin “similarity report,” highlighting text the detector indicates could be plagiarized.

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Courtesy of Delilah Brumer

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“At first I didn’t know what it was,” Ibarra said. “It shows green, yellow, red, so at first I thought it was grading the quality of my writing.” On a short assignment, she said, it’s almost impossible to avoid a “yellow” report because Turnitin’s text-matching scanners will flag quoted material and suggest it could be plagiarized. So far, none of Ibarra’s professors have accused her of academic dishonesty, but the risk, she said — even if she doesn’t intentionally plagiarize or use ChatGPT — is “really stressful.”

Ibarra has a tool called Grammarly installed on her computer that she has been using since high school to catch spelling and grammar mistakes; only now, she said, some professors at Cal State Northridge tell students not to even use spell-check tools because they’re bolstered by AI. Microsoft Word, Google Docs and Grammarly now all rely on the same algorithms that create ChatGPT’s human-sounding responses to suggest improvements to users’ writing. Ibarra says she uses Grammarly only to correct misspellings and missed commas, but, like other students interviewed for this story, she isn’t always sure when appropriate use of ubiquitous technology veers into academic dishonesty.

Joshua Hurst, who just finished his junior year at Cal State Northridge, said Turnitin flagged his writing in the spring of 2024. He hadn’t used ChatGPT to craft the assignment, but he had used Grammarly to clean up his writing before turning it in. His professor didn’t dock his grade, but Hurst knows other professors might have. Now he runs his writing through two different checkers before submitting anything.

Hurst is excited about AI-driven innovation and is glad to be part of a generation that gets to experience it, but the lack of consensus over acceptable AI use and the threats posed by faulty detectors make him shake his head.

“Students,” he said, “are the ones who are caught in the middle.”

The Center for Democracy & Technology, a D.C.-based nonprofit focused on research and advocacy around digital rights, surveyed high schoolers about their experiences with a range of educational technologies last summer. At the request of The Markup, now a part of CalMatters, researchers asked students whether they or anyone they know had been wrongly accused of using generative AI to cheat. One in five said yes.

When Common Sense Media surveyed a nationally representative group of teenagers about their AI use last year, it found that Black teens were twice as likely as white and Latino teens to say their teachers had flagged their work as AI-generated when it wasn’t. In their report about the survey, researchers attributed this difference, in part, to teachers’ bias. Black students have long been disciplined at far higher rates than their peers.

Other researchers have pointed to the vulnerability of non-native English speakers subjected to these detectors because their writing is likely to use simpler syntax and a more limited vocabulary, which happens to be typical of AI-generated writing.

Nilka Desiree Abbas suspects that’s why she was accused in the summer of 2023. A native Spanish speaker, she was taking a political science course at San Bernardino Valley College and got a zero on an assignment along with a curt message from her professor saying she had used ChatGPT. But Abbas, who is from Puerto Rico, said she hadn’t.

“It took me so long to go back to school,” she said with a toddler at her side. “To be falsely accused felt devastating.” She ultimately passed the class with a B and graduated with a degree in administration of justice the following spring, but she was shaken. She took photos of her progress on assignments in her remaining courses to create an evidence trail of original work.

Turnitin has since fine-tuned its detector to avoid accusing non-native English speakers more often than native English speakers, but it acknowledges its detector still gets it wrong sometimes. And stories like Abbas’s have saturated Reddit communities and TikTok feeds, creating anxiety even among students who don’t think they cross any academic integrity lines while completing their assignments.

CalMatters and The Markup spoke with more than a dozen current undergrads, and virtually all of them described strategies to reduce the likelihood of being wrongly accused. A freshman said she adds typos to her writing to distinguish it from AI’s. Many students said they check their papers with Turnitin before submitting them, when professors allow it, and with additional online detectors for good measure. This step has become a form of due diligence for students, most of whom describe at least some level of concern that they could be accused without having done anything wrong.

Jasmine Ruys, who oversees student conduct cases at College of the Canyons, said she often sees students who think they were wrongly accused but unwittingly used AI.

“There are students who go to other colleges where that college purchases Grammarly, the pro version, installs it on their computers to help them and when they turn it in to our instructors, it gets caught by the AI detector,” Ruys said. “It’s hard because students think they’re doing the right thing and they’re getting caught up in it because [AI] is just embedded in everything.”

The illusion of a solution

Turnitin’s original text-matching software wasn’t especially sophisticated at detecting actual plagiarism, but at least it could point to the original source behind its accusations, and a faculty member had something to assess; they could ignore the text Turnitin highlighted because students were quoting reading material or citing an appropriate source. The AI detector determines what portion of an assignment was probably generated by AI but leaves it to faculty members to puzzle through whether that AI-like text represents a violation of academic integrity.

Adam Kaiserman has taught English at College of the Canyons for more than a decade. Unlike some of his colleagues who forgo Turnitin’s technology, he looks closely at the software’s similarity reports. And while he said he plans to keep using the tool, he didn’t describe it as very helpful. Student habits have shifted. Both Kaiserman and Ruys said they almost never see traditional plagiarism in Turnitin’s text matches anymore; students who are inclined to cut corners will just use AI chatbots instead. And the software misses much of the AI-generated writing it scans, in part because Turnitin has become more conservative about what it flags to avoid accusing honest students. The software also doesn’t scan for content accuracy, leaving a key tell of AI writing undetected.

Adam Kaiserman lectures during his English class at College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita on May 6, 2025.

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Jules Hotz

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“The biggest tipoff [of AI use] are fake quotes or hallucinations, which Turnitin isn’t good at catching,” Kaiserman said. When a paper mentions a person who doesn’t exist or a quote that never appeared in the reading, what many refer to as “hallucinations,” Turnitin has no idea. It just measures how much the writing mirrors the style of AI-written text.

While many students are as honest as ever, plenty have started to use AI. They describe using ChatGPT on assignments they don’t care about, reserving their full effort for papers they see as a higher priority. Sometimes they outsource deeper thinking and planning to AI when they are stumped by a blank page and want help with how to write an introduction or structure a paper. In the Common Sense Media survey, 63% of teens said they had used a chatbot or text generator for school assignments.

Now, many colleges make chatbots available to students for free, driving even wider use. A survey of undergraduates in the United Kingdom this past December found 88% had used AI on assignments, mostly to explain concepts, summarize content and suggest research ideas, but 18% of those surveyed said they had submitted work that included some AI-generated text.

At College of the Canyons, Ruys has found that when students do use a chatbot to complete a paper, it’s usually because they had too much on their plate with school, they were preoccupied with work or family commitments or they didn’t understand the assignment. Instead of going to their professors, they went to AI. During academic-dishonesty hearings, she guides students to campus resources that can help them better manage their workloads. But she considers a lot of AI use to be in an ethical gray area, including when students write a first draft themselves and then polish it with an AI tool.

“Isn’t that very similar to our tutors?” Ruys mused.

Administrators from the California State University Office of the Chancellor, Cal State Northridge and the Los Angeles Community College District, all of whom occasionally teach, said they don’t use Turnitin in their own courses, even if they defend their institutions’ software licenses more broadly. Stanford University doesn’t license the technology at all, advising its faculty that the tools can erode feelings of trust and belonging among students and raise questions about their privacy and intellectual-property rights.

Stommel, the University of Denver professor, said faculty members often believe cheating is on the rise and that detectors are one of the only ways to keep students honest. But he shares evidence that cheating rates have long remained largely flat, even post-ChatGPT. He also pans the use of Turnitin as a scare tactic. “We see this with the criminal-justice system,” he said. “Deterrence doesn’t actually work.” What does work, he argues, is building trusting relationships with students. “Turnitin immediately fractures that relationship with students.”

Sean Michael Morris, a frequent co-author of Stommel’s and a longtime educator, also tries to convince faculty members they don’t need Turnitin despite the company’s marketing, which champions its value to academic integrity.

“Ed tech does a good job of convincing you that it is huge, permanent, there, 100% necessary for education,” he said. “That’s its big lie.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

A group of California lawmakers called on federal officials to halt and reject a proposed land exchange in Yosemite National Park that would allow a private developer to take control of a strip of land in the park for an access road to the park’s main attractions.

The letter to Department of the Interior Secretary Doug Burgum on Wednesday was signed by a bipartisan group of 61 state legislators led by Assemblymember Greg Wallis, a Republican who represents Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

“Republicans and Democrats from both houses of the Legislature are standing together because some things are bigger than politics,” Wallis said in a statement. “Yosemite is not a subdivision. It is not a bargaining chip. And it is not for sale. Secretary Burgum and the administration should put an end to this proposal.”

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum (center) visited the Tunnel Tops in San Francisco in 2025 after he and then-Attorney General Pam Bondi toured Alcatraz ahead of their announcement to reopen the former federal prison.

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Katie DeBenedetti

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KQED

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The group argued that the proposed land exchange is counter to the mission of the National Park Service and the founding of Yosemite in 1864, which set aside the start of the park for public use and protection for the first time in the history of the federal government.

“What is being proposed now runs directly against that founding principle, more than a century and a half later,” the letter states.

It continues later: “Our national parks belong equally to every American. They are not the Department’s to trade away, and they are not for sale.”

The proposal was first reported by news outlet NOTUS, which published a story last week alleging that members of the Trump administration were meeting with representatives of Kingsbarn Realty Capital, a private equity group that owns an 83-acre parcel next to the park. In an email to KQED, Kingsbarn’s lawyer Lanny J. Davis confirmed the group is pursuing the land exchange to build a new access road from its property to the park.

Previous owners have pushed for the same deal since the early 2000s and failed in court.

State Assemblymember Marc Berman (D-Menlo Park), who signed on to the letter, called the proposal “indefensible,” and said he’s looking at state laws to ensure a similar proposal could never slip through.

“If the Trump administration can’t defend this publicly in broad daylight, then they shouldn’t be doing it,” he said.

Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Marin) told KQED’s Forum on Wednesday that he’s worried there isn’t enough opposition among his Republican colleagues in Congress to stop the Trump administration’s efforts.

“I have not seen a single Republican colleague willing to stand up to Donald Trump when he decides that he’s just going to do something,” Huffman said. “So that is my concern, that he just plows ahead with this — even if it has dubious legal authority, or even if it’s an open violation of the law. He’s doing stuff like that anyway. And in this Congress, there’s no one here to stop him.”

In a statement to KQED, state Sen. Marie Alvarado-Gil (R-Modesto), whose district includes parts of Yosemite, said she will “keep pressing the Department [of the Interior] for a clear answer that this exchange will not proceed.”

Since the news of the deal broke late last week, it has sparked condemnation from a number of Democratic state leaders, including Sens. Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff, as well as Attorney General Rob Bonta and Bonta’s predecessor, Xavier Becerra, who leads the race for California governor.

“The secretive backroom land-exchange scheme has gotten everyone’s attention,” said Neal Desai, senior Pacific regional director of the National Parks Conservation Association. “I can’t recall another issue — and I’ve been working in the conservation space for over a couple of decades — where the response has been this sharp and so one-sided that this is a terrible idea that should not happen.”

The backlash comes at a turbulent time for National Park Service employees, who have faced layoffs, staffing cuts and fear of retaliation for speaking up against Trump administration policies since the start of the second Trump administration.

Some former employees have also raised concerns about a potential reorganization of the National Park Service, according to a separate letter sent to Burgum’s office Wednesday. According to an email seen by KQED, park superintendents have been asked to attend in-person regional meetings in September — with no clear agenda beyond discussing “agency priorities, our FY 2026 outlook, and other matters important to the work ahead.”

The letter to Burgam, signed by 20 retired parks superintendents warns: “An ill-advised and hastily planned reorganization could dismantle that structure, putting our parks — and those who visit them — at great risk.”

Emily Thompson, executive director of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, which organized the letter, said the email about regional meetings “raises some alarm bells.”

“The Park Service is already operating from a difficult place, from a place of crisis,” she said. “And any additional cuts, any movements or actions that would further jeopardize the capacity of the folks that are left, that’s concerning. It’s worrying, and it’ll have a devastating impact on the Park Service.”

Among the letter’s signatories is Don Neubacher, retired Yosemite superintendent, who has been a vocal advocate for parks amid the Trump administration’s changes.

Thompson said she’s worried parks leaders will be stretched even further than they already are, and local decision-making over parks could be in jeopardy.

“Morale is low,” Thompson said. “It’s a hard time to be a federal employee. Anything that … contributes to this culture of fear, it’s just not acceptable.”

This story first appeared on Long Beach Post.

Long Beach is offering up to $1,500 for local business owners and landlords to equip their storefronts with safety measures like cameras, floodlights, alarms and point-of-sale systems.

The grant program is accepting online applications now. You can apply here.

Businesses with storefronts of 1,500 square feet or less may receive grants of up to $750, while businesses between 1,500 and 5,000 square feet are eligible for up to $1,500.

Nonprofit organizations are eligible as well, and landlords can apply on behalf of commercial storefronts that are vacant or occupied. Franchises can also receive the grant.

To qualify, a business must:

• Have an active business license for a storefront within the city
• Be independently owned and operated (franchises are eligible)
• Be currently open and active for business
• Earn no more than $5 million in annual gross revenue
• Hold “active” status with the California Secretary of State for corporations, limited liability companies and limited partnerships

The funds will be provided as a reimbursement after eligible security improvements are installed. Grants will be given out until funds are exhausted.

It’s a great idea, according to Edwin Jara, who manages a pet store in Belmont Heights and was on the receiving end of a break-in earlier this year.

His store had security measures already in place — two cameras and an alarm system — but even that wasn’t enough to deter a masked burglar who grabbed $1,000 cash and a handful of dog treats.

Despite having footage of the burglar, Jara said police haven’t been able to catch the person and that a detective never responded after he filed a police report.

The grant program is being paid for with $350,000 from the city’s Redvelopment Agency along with $50,000 from Los Angeles County Supervisor Janice Hahn’s office.

“Our local small businesses are part of the fabric of our neighborhoods, and when business owners feel unsafe, the whole community feels it,” Hahn said in a statement.

In a statement, Mayor Rex Richardson said the program is a “direct investment in the hardworking business owners who make our commercial corridors vibrant and welcoming.”

Jara said he would consider applying for a grant if the city could send someone to help him and the store’s owner fill out the application.

He was offered a separate grant to replace a glass door the burglar smashed, but the store’s owner opted not to fill out the application.

“There was a lot of stuff that we needed to do, and I don’t have a lot of that information,” Jara said.

Santa Monica College has money problems. Spending has outpaced revenues over the last three fiscal years — and the college doesn’t have enough in its coffers to pay for retirement benefits.

That’s according to the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges, the body responsible for evaluating community colleges. The organization has moved to “enhanced fiscal monitoring” of SMC.

In a statement to LAist, Mac Powell, president of ACCJC, said, “Enhanced monitoring is part of the Commission’s routine annual process for identifying and working with institutions that may be experiencing financial pressures; it is not, by itself, an accreditation sanction or adverse action.”

More than 25,000 students are enrolled at SMC, with over 50% identifying as first-generation. The school has around 320 full-time faculty and 852 part-time faculty. On their website, SMC touts itself as the “#1 Transfer College” to University of California schools, Loyola Marymount University and the University of Southern California.

In a letter to Santa Monica College informing them of the increased monitoring, ACCJC Vice President Melynie Schiel wrote that a three-year decline of the ending cash balance and multiple open labor agreements factored into the “at risk” designation.

Santa Monica College declined an interview with LAist. But in a post online, Santa Monica College President Kathryn Jeffery wrote that the at-risk category was largely “backward-looking.”

So what does ‘enhanced fiscal monitoring’ mean?

Gaining accreditation from a body like the ACCJC allows SMC to qualify for federal funding and to distribute financial aid to students.

Every year, institutions accredited by the ACCJC submit financial information, including reserves, operating revenues and deficits, salary and benefit costs, enrollment trends and audit findings.

If institutions fall in the “at risk” category like Santa Monica College, they are placed on increased monitoring. This helps ACCJC “better understand the circumstances, remain informed about the institution’s response, and track progress over time,” Powell said.

During this time, ACCJC staffers will meet with representatives from Santa Monica College “and the institution provides information regarding the circumstances contributing to its fiscal condition and the actions it is taking in response,” Powell said.

Powell said that, for students and prospective students, the enhanced fiscal monitoring "indicates that ACCJC is paying closer attention to the institution's financial condition while the institution addresses identified fiscal challenges."

Is SMC’s accreditation at risk?

In short: No.

“Santa Monica College is accredited by ACCJC and, at this time, is not in danger of losing its accreditation, nor is an adverse accreditation action by the Commission currently anticipated,” Powell said. “The purpose of enhanced monitoring is precisely to identify concerns early and provide appropriate oversight while institutions work to address them.”

Are there any other colleges in Southern California in the same boat?

Powell said ACCJC typically doesn't make public whether a college is subject to increased monitoring.

“We are aware that Santa Monica College has chosen to publicly disclose its own fiscal monitoring status. That disclosure was made independently by the institution and does not reflect a change in ACCJC's policy regarding the confidentiality of this information for other member institutions,” Powell added.

What is Santa Monica College doing to address their fiscal woes?

Jeffery wrote in a memo to employees posted on the college website that the at-risk rating “does not account for far-reaching actions the College has taken since,” noting actions like layoffs and contract non-renewals, employee furloughs and salary freezes; and cutting vacant positions.

Powell told LAist in a written statement ACCJC would not speculate about how decisions such as layoffs, salary freezes, or contract non-renewals might affect the student experience.

"From an accreditation perspective, ACCJC's focus is on whether an institution continues to meet accreditation standards, including maintaining the financial stability, staffing, programs, and student support necessary to fulfill its educational mission," he said. "Enhanced fiscal monitoring helps ensure that the Commission remains informed about an institution's financial condition and its capacity to continue serving students effectively."

Amid a growing nationwide backlash against license-plate cameras, California this week, for the fifth year running, failed to enact regulations on the technology.

A bill in the Legislature would have strengthened privacy protections on how license plate data is collected and shared. It also would have guarded against misuse of automated license plate readers by law enforcement officers.

But after clearing the state senate the bill was stopped in the Assembly by majority leader Cecilia Aguilar-Curry on Monday, the final day the Legislature meets this year, before it could be introduced for a floor vote. It was one of a handful of bills that enjoyed strong support from lawmakers and looked poised to pass but died under mysterious circumstances.

All the bills California lawmakers have proposed since 2022 to reform or update regulations on license plate tracking by law enforcement agencies have failed to pass or become law. A similar bill passed last year but was vetoed by Gov. Gavin Newsom.

“It’s a really disappointing outcome at a time when there is bipartisan concern about this mass surveillance tool,” UC Berkeley Center for Law & Technology codirector Catherine Crump told CalMatters. Crump testified in support of the bill in July.

Lawmakers pushing for more regulation of the readers point to police misuse of the data they collect, including illegally using it to help federal immigration enforcers and stalking people.

But law enforcement agencies say many of the proposed regulations would cripple a tool they say has helped solve a wide range of crimes.

“We were concerned that this bill was going to limit the utility of ALPR data to solve crimes, find missing persons, exonerate innocent individuals, and so the fact that it did not pass, we're glad for that,” California State Sheriff’s Association legislative director Cory Salzillo told CalMatters.

Mounting privacy concerns

Failure to pass the bill or even bring it up for a final vote comes at a time when opposition to license plate readers is growing in and beyond California. Police in Los Angeles and Redwood City and elected officials in California localities like El Cerrito and Campbell have ended contracts with the license plate reader company Flock Safety in recent weeks. Nationwide, more than 200 cities or law enforcement agencies ended license plate reader contracts in August, more than any other month since 2021, according to Secure Justice, a group led by Brian Hofer, a Bay Area privacy advocate who was held at gunpoint after a license plate reader incorrectly told sheriff’s deputies he was driving a stolen car.

License plate readers use cameras and artificial intelligence to log the plate numbers of passing cars. The readers are joined into networks used by law enforcement and information from them can be shared locally or nationwide. The tech can locate criminal suspects or missing persons, but it’s also been tied to police misconduct and immigration enforcement in violation of state law. More than 230 California police or sheriff’s departments currently use license plate readers, according to bill author Senator Sabrina Cervantes, a Democrat from Riverside.

An automated license plate recognition camera near an orchard along Avenue 7 ½ outside of Firebaugh on Aug. 26, 2026.

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Larry Valenzuela

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CalMatters

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“It’s unfortunate that Senate Bill 1013 did not get the chance to be voted on before the deadline passed, but I look forward to continuing to fight for the privacy rights of Californians next year,” she wrote in a statement shared with CalMatters.

Cervantes argued in July that protections in the bill are necessary to prevent unlawful data sharing, because license plate readers routinely collect information about the movement of millions of law-abiding Californians, and to stop other forms of police misconduct. Lawmakers say license plate readers were unlawfully used by law enforcement officers to stalk or harass private citizens in Los Angeles, Marin, Orange, Riverside, Sacramento, San Diego, and Shasta counties.

Enforcement agencies outside of California have put the technology to even more controversial use. Oakland activist Crystal Zermeño, who attended a protest against the technology outside City Hall last month, said she’s concerned about the tech being used to track women who get abortions or by federal authorities. After Cervantes’ bill died, she asked, “How could we not as a state have the political will to do this in a moment when all of these [federal immigration enforcement] attacks are happening and we have limited defense?”

Cervantes’ Senate Bill 1013 would have restricted state law enforcement agencies to using license plate data only for locating criminal suspects or missing people, would have made police take privacy and cybersecurity training, would have restricted sharing with national databases by default, and would have required the attorney general’s office carry out random audits of license plate reader activity for misuse.

Had the bill come up for a vote, it still might have died, given support for the readers as tools of law and order. Nearly 40 law enforcement agencies and police unions opposed the bill.

Regulations in the measure had already been weakened, trading a requirement that police delete license plate data after 30 days for one that they “archive” it after 60 days, at which point they would need to obtain a warrant to search the data, unless it was connected to an active investigation or vehicle hunt. Police argued that old license plate data had helped solve cold cases and missing people investigations, and some, like the California State Sheriff’s Association, opposed the bill even after it was watered down. Newsom vetoed last year’s bill in part because it would have ordered police to delete license plate data after 60 days.

CalMatters reporting last year and this year found that local law enforcement agencies across Southern California repeatedly shared information with federal immigration agencies, a violation of a state law. A 2020 state audit and investigation by Attorney General Rob Bonta found similar violations of state law that prohibits sharing license plate reader data with out-of-state or federal law enforcement agencies. Since June 2024 the California Attorney General’s Office has contacted 18 law enforcement agencies about possible or known violations of Senate Bill 34 and filed a lawsuit against the city of El Cajon near San Diego to stop the practice.

There are roughly 70 documented instances nationwide where police officers misused automated license plate readers to do things like track their wives, stalk formal partners or pursue love interests, according to the Washington Post, including former Riverside County sheriff’s deputy Alexander Vanny, who used Flock to stalk his former fiancée and was sentenced to six years in prison in February.

The technology can also inaccurately label some drivers as criminal suspects, leading to potentially violent confrontations. A Los Angeles Police Department audit released in July found that one out of three vehicles identified as stolen by Flock cameras were inaccurately identified.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.