Dan
The first thing anyone at Merritt College learned about the ghosts was that they had better grades than we did.
Rich Hale said it as a joke, at the start of the all-staff meeting on the first Thursday in November, and about half the room laughed, the half that hadn't read the letter yet. I'd read the letter. I'd been the one to forward it, because it arrived in the general IT inbox by mistake, from the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Federal Student Aid, with a subject line that began Notice of Program Review and ended with our institution's number.
The meeting was in the old chapel, because it's the only room on campus that still holds everybody. That used to be a lot of people. Now we fill the first eight pews and leave the rest for the dust. The windows are the original stained glass, donated by the Merritt family when the Works was making money: Saint Joseph the Worker, with a hammer, standing in front of something that looks a lot like a blast furnace.
I sat in the sixth pew, on the aisle, where I can leave if the projector needs me. Ruth Pelaski was in front of me, knitting something gray. Denise Okafor from Admissions was two seats over, very still, which is not like Denise.
Rich stood at the front in his navy jacket, with his good hair, and the provost beside him looking like a man who'd been told to stand there and not speak. Dr. Osei, the new President, was in Harrisburg, meeting with legislators about the budget. Some people said she'd gone so she wouldn't have to be here for this. Ruth said she'd gone to bring back money, which is what presidents are for.
"I'll be straight with you," Rich said. "We have a problem nobody here knows how to tackle."
* * *
He explained it well. He always does.
For the past several years, Merritt had been receiving applications from students who didn't exist. They had names and birthdays and Social Security numbers. They had transcripts from real high schools and essays about overcoming adversity. They enrolled in online courses, applied for financial aid, collected it, and disappeared. Some of them turned in coursework for weeks before they vanished. Admissions had started calling them ghosts.
"And here's the joke," Rich said. "Their grades were better than ours."
Nobody laughed the second time.
The Department of Education had noticed before we did. Aid patterns from Merritt that didn't look right: money going to accounts in other states, students who never logged in to a single class after the aid cleared. The letter said a program review would begin in the spring. If the review found that Merritt had failed to verify its students, the college could lose its eligibility for federal student aid.
Rich let that sit, and then said what everyone in the chapel already understood. "Eighty-one percent of our students depend on federal aid. Without it, there is no Merritt College."
I watched it go through the room. You could see it land on each person separately, the way rain starts on a parking lot, one dark spot at a time. Ruth's needles stopped. Denise closed her eyes.
"How many?" someone asked from the back.
"We don't know," Rich said. "That's the honest answer. Some of them are very convincing."
Then the voice I'd been waiting for, from the second pew, dry as a cracker.
"Richard." Leonard Voss didn't stand. He's been at Merritt thirty-four years and he hasn't stood for a question since the nineties. "This fall you announced that our enrollment was up six percent. The only college in western Pennsylvania that grew. There was a banner." He paused. "How many of those students are real?"
It was quiet enough to hear the radiator.
"That," Rich said, without missing a beat, "is exactly what we're going to find out." He smiled at Voss, warmly, the way he smiles at donors. "And I want everyone here to know that my office has been through every one of its own processes with a fine-tooth comb. Our house is clean. These people are coming at us from outside."
Voss looked at him over his glasses for a long moment and said nothing, which from Voss is a speech.
* * *
"So here's what we're doing," Rich said, and clicked to his last slide.
It said A Data-Driven Response, over a stock photo of a young woman looking thoughtfully at a laptop.
"Starting Monday, my office is bringing on a data analytics intern. A recent graduate, data science, with honors. Remote, which keeps the cost down. Their job will be to go through our records and get us a picture of the problem the board can understand, before the federal reviewers get here and draw one for us."
A murmur went through the pews, the particular murmur of faculty who have just heard the word intern attached to the survival of their institution.
"An intern," someone said, not quite under their breath.
"A very talented one," Rich said pleasantly. "And, frankly, an affordable one. I'm not going to stand here and ask the board for a consultant at four hundred dollars an hour while we're asking all of you to share copiers." He looked out over the eight pews. "We're going to need everyone's cooperation. Especially IT."
A few heads turned toward me. I raised a hand about two inches, the universal sign for yes, that's me, the guy who resets your password.
That was the moment I felt it. Something cold and familiar, low in the stomach, the same thing I'd felt two years before when the college brought in the vendor tool that did half of what my team used to do, and last spring when they let two of my people go and called it restructuring.
It always comes the same way. It comes as a slide with a stock photo. It comes as affordable and data-driven. It comes as a kid fresh out of school on the other side of a screen, who'll be asked to look at the identity records I've spent fifteen years keeping, and who'll find in a month what I didn't find in five years.
Afterward, on the steps, Ruth tucked her knitting into her bag and said, "A new baby. How nice. I'll have to make a cake."
"The kid's remote, Ruth."
"Then you'll have to eat it for him," she said, and patted my arm, and went down the steps into the cold.
I was digging for my keys when a hand landed on my shoulder, warm and heavy, the way a coach's hand lands.
"Shib." Rich, coat on, scarf in Merritt blue, smiling the donor smile, though there were no donors on the chapel steps, just me and a smoker from Facilities. "Thanks for forwarding that letter so fast. You saved us a week."
"It came to the wrong inbox. I just sent it to the right one."
"That's what I mean. Anybody else would've sat on it." He squeezed my shoulder, once, and let go. "How's the back?"
"November."
"Ah. November." He nodded, like we were two veterans of the same war, which in a way we were. We'd started at Merritt within three years of each other. I'd watched him go from assistant director of admissions to vice president, one office at a time, always a little better dressed than the job. He'd watched me stay exactly where I was. Neither of us had ever said anything about it.
"Listen," he said, more quietly. "That letter. It came to IT first. Who else has seen it?"
"You. The provost. Osei's office, I assume, by now."
"And on your side?"
"Just me."
"Good." He smiled again. "I told them what it was in there, and that's all. The letter itself, the numbers, the account details, let's keep that between us until the board's been briefed. You know how this town is. One person at the Giant Eagle hears federal review with a dollar figure attached and by Sunday the whole valley thinks we're closing." He buttoned his coat. "You're the only person in this building I'd trust with the keys, Shib. You know that."
He went down the steps to the lot, to his Buick, and I watched his taillights go out past the chapel and turn toward the river.
I remember thinking it was a nice thing to say. I remember being, for about a minute, a little bit flattered. That's the thing about Rich. He always knew exactly how much warmth a man could take before he'd start to wonder why he was getting it, and he always stopped just short.
* * *
I drove home the long way, along the river, past the dark half of the Works and the half that's a brewery, with the radio off.
I did the arithmetic at the red light by the Route 8 bridge, because arithmetic is what I do when I don't want to feel things yet.
Twelve hundred students, give or take. Eighty-one percent of them on federal aid. Without it, maybe two hundred could pay their own way, and two hundred students is a large seminar. Three hundred and forty employees, faculty and staff, which makes Merritt the second-largest employer in Carlow Falls after the hospital. Ruth. Denise. The guys in Facilities. Gloria in the archive, who's seventy-one and has nowhere else to go. Me.
And then the town behind that: the diner on Water Street that lives on faculty breakfasts, the landlords who rent to students, the Giant Eagle on Route 8, the bar where the adjuncts go on Thursdays. When the Works closed, it took fifteen years for the town to stop falling. Some people think it still hasn't. If Merritt goes, the town will be finished in one bad spring.
The light turned green. Somebody behind me honked, gently, the way people honk in a town where they'll see you at church.
Emma was upstairs with her music on. I sat at the kitchen table with the letter from the Department of Education open on my laptop, reading it a third time, as if the words might rearrange themselves into something smaller.
I thought about ghosts with better grades than ours. I thought about Voss asking how many of our students were real, and Rich saying our house is clean without blinking. I thought about a kid somewhere, packing nothing, because you don't pack to start a job on a screen.
On Monday I'd set up his accounts. I'd walk him through the login, and when the green check came up, I'd tell him what I tell every new hire. As far as Merritt's concerned, you're officially real. It always gets a laugh.
I went to bed at eleven. I lay awake until one, the way I do now, listening to the river you can always hear in Carlow Falls if you stop making noise.