Proposed New College Student Database Raises Privacy Concerns
By Huijuan Jia
WASHINGTON, Dec. 15 -Federal officials are considering creating a national database containing detailed information about students including financial data, a move advocates say would facilitate tracking performance of colleges but critics argue would constitute an invasion of the students’ privacy.
The National Center for Education Statistics, a division of the Department of Education responsible for gathering and processing data, is studying the feasibility of a proposed redesign of its Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, which currently requires that colleges report student data in summary form. The proposal calls for creating a new “unit record” system in which schools would provide the information on a student-by-student basis instead of in a broad summary.
The current system collects survey data from all post-secondary schools that receive federal financial assistance. Student data currently collected by the Web-based system include enrollments, completions, graduation rates, tuition and student financial aid. Much of this data is aggregated by several student characteristics.
Under the proposed change, the department would use Social Security numbers to match each student’s data in different portions of the database. In addition to the information currently collected, the new system would include data on tuition and fees paid, loans and federal, state and institutional grant awards for each student enrolled in the school.
Proponents of the proposal, including the American Council on Education, the
American Association of State Colleges and Universities and the State Higher
Education Executive Officers Association, argue that the present system is unable to provide an accurate portrayal of how well colleges educate students in a number of measures, including, for example, graduation rates.
Advocates also argue that the new system would help to more accurately measure a college’s performance by providing better information on the graduation rate, and for the first time, track an institution’s net price, or what students actually pay after financial aid.
Critics, however, particularly lobbyists for private colleges, have expressed concerns that such a new system would invade a student’s privacy and could also expose students to identity theft.
The National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, which represents private colleges, strongly opposes the proposal. Sarah Flanagan, vice president for government relations of the association, said “there is a Big Brother aspect of all of this.”
“We do not believe that the price for enrolling in college should be permanent entry into a federal registry, and we fear that the existence of such a massive registry will prove irresistible to future demands for access to the data for non-educational purposes,” the association stated in an issue brief on its Website, “The idea that students would enter a federal registry by enrolling in college and could be tracked for the rest of their lives is frightening. A central database containing massive amounts of data for each of the 16.5 million post-secondary students in the United States, including those who do not receive any federal financial aid, is chilling.”
With identity theft on the rise and colleges moving away from the use of Social Security numbers, the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities called the proposed system “a step backward for privacy rights.”
Jeff von Munkwitz-Smith, university registrar at the University of Connecticut, said he supports the goal of providing better information on graduation rates, time to completion, student migration and the real cost of attendance but believes the proposal would “unnecessarily increase” the burden on institutions.
“As with most proposals, the devil is in the details,” he said, “Decisions about the data elements to be collected, data element definitions and the timing of the submissions will make a huge difference in the burden on institutions. Keeping the process as clean and simple as possible would benefit all of us.”
One of the purposes of the new system would be verify enrollment for loans through the National Student Loan Data System. But Munkwitz-Smith said that institutions already have the ability to provide such verifications.
“If the purpose of the change to unit record data collection is to be able to answer the questions that Congress, institutions and the public have about graduation rates, etc.,” he said in an e-mail response. “Why needlessly complicate the change by attempting to solve a problem that institutions already have solved?”
Congress will start early next year to reauthorize the Higher Education Act, which sets the rules for higher education-related grants and expired at the end of September. Advocates of the new system would like Congress to include a field test in approximately 1,200 to 1,500 institutions in 2006-2007, and nationwide implementation in 2007-2008, according to Dennis Carroll, associate commissioner of the postsecondary studies division at the National Center for Education Statistics.
In late October and early November, the center sponsored three conferences, called “technical review panels,” to discuss converting the current data collection system. At the November 9-10 meeting, the center’s commissioner, Robert Lerner, reiterated that the agency would take no action unless Congress authorizes the proposal and appropriates funds for its implementation.
Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president of the American Council on Education, and other advocates of the proposal have been urging Congress to consider establishing the unit record system as part of the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. Hartle warned at the meeting that there would be dangers to the higher education community if the new system is not revised, but he doubted it could be done quickly and easily. He called the timetable “breathtakingly optimistic,” citing privacy and technical issues as stumbling blocks to moving forward.
Bernard Fryshman, executive vice president of the Association of Advanced Rabbinical and Talmudic Schools, called the database a “total invasion of privacy of individuals and a major change.”
“It isn’t anybody’s business where I’ve gone or what I’ve done,” Fryshman said. “Nobody should record these data, no matter how well protected.”
Carroll assured that no one outside of the National Center for Education Statistics and its contractors would have access to the database.
“Records go in, but never go out,” Carroll said.
But some education experts, including Becky Timmons, the American Council on Education’s director of government relations, worried that other agencies might want access to the database once it is built.
At an earlier meeting in November, panelists expressed their concerns about using Social Security numbers as the tracking device in the data. Peggye Cohen, assistant vice president of George Washington University, said that students there are “up in arms” over the use of Social Security numbers and that the school is involved in a big project to stop using them in order to help cut down on identity theft.
Enacting the proposal also would require changing the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, which requires a student’s or parent’s permission to release most student records.
As part of the design of the unit record system, once it is authorized and appropriated, the National Center for Education Statistics said it would hold more panel meetings to discuss the issue of student privacy and rights. A report on the proposal is currently being prepared and is expected to be submitted to Congress in February.
The Department of Education has not released cost figures for implementing such a system, but higher education lobbyists estimate the project to initially require $4 million-$6 million.
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