SEC. 132. DATABASES OF STUDENT INFORMATION PROHIBITED.
(a) PROHIBITION. Except as described in (b), nothing in this Act shall be construed to authorize the design, development, creation, implementation, or maintenance of a nationwide database of personally identifiable information on individuals receiving assistance, attending institutions receiving assistance, or otherwise involved in any studies or other collections of data under this Act, including a student unit record system, an education bar code system, or any other system that tracks individual students over time. (b) EXCEPTION. The provisions of subsection (a) shall not affect the loan obligation enforcement activities described in section 485B of this Act.
But of all the provisions in the law, this is possibly the most shortsighted, damaging, and indicative of the relentless efforts of the private higher education establishment to shield itself from any kind of scrutiny from the outside world.
This is the back-story: The National Center for Education Statistics, an independent arm of the U.S. Department of Education, gathers information about the nation's colleges and universities through the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). Every year, each institution is required to fill out and submit a series of surveys about themselves and their students, focused on topics such as enrollment, funding, staffing, degrees awarded, financial aid, and graduation rates. This process is the backbone of higher-education data-gathering; it's the only way to consistently know anything about the institutions that compromise a vital segment of the economy.
It's also a time-consuming, labor-intensive, and somewhat antiquated process, with institutions filling in thousands of data points across the various surveys. Each survey is separate, greatly reducing the ability to cross-reference information in a useful way. For example, because the graduation rate and financial aid surveys are separate, we know the percent of students at a given institution who graduate within six years, and the percent who receive financial aid, but not the percent of financial aid recipients who graduate within six years.
To modernize this system, IPEDS proposed a new way of submitting information: instead of each institution aggregating it's internal student-level data into a bunch of separate, disconnected surveys, they would instead simply submit that student-level, or "unit record," information to IPEDS directly. In addition to being more efficient from the institutional perspective (after investing in some new data infrastructure), it would also allow for much more accurate calculation of key institutional measures like graduation rates and net student prices.
Institutions have long complained that current federal graduation rate measures are inaccurate because they don't give institutions credit for students who transfer to another institution and graduate there. The unit-record system would fix that problem, because IPEDS would be able to connect enrollment information from one institution to graduation information from another. Institutions have also complained that current measures of the cost of going to college are overstated because they don't show the average "net price" to students after subtracting out financial aid, tuition discounts, etc. The unit record system would have fixed that problem too.
Faced with a system that would have made their graduation rates look higher and prices look lower, what did the private higher education establishment do? It crushed the unit record system like a bug.
While associations of public universities such as the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) were supportive of the unit record system, the private colleges, represented most prominently by the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (NAICU) attacked the idea from the very beginning. Aligning themselves with far-right privacy nuts like the Eagle Forum, they characterized the idea as the first step toward an Orwellian nightmare dystopia where every student is monitored from cradle to grave by the faceless bureaucrats of some presumably totalitarian regime. The president of Gettysburg College wrote breathlessly in the Washington Post that:
"The threat to our students' privacy is of grave concern," wondering "at what cost to individual privacy," asserting that such a "mammoth" and "gigantic" project would be a "costly and troubling assault on privacy," and so on. Because "the potential for abuse of power and violation of civil liberties is immense," she said, Congress "must reject this measure."And so Congress did exactly that, inserting the HEA language seen above.
What accounts for this over-the-top reaction? Simple: colleges and universities--particularly private colleges and univerisites--are resolutely opposed to any form of increased public scrutiny. As far as they're concerned, the quality of education they provide to their students and the benefits they give to society in exchange for the substantial public financial support they receive through student financial aid and their tax-exempt status is nobody's business but their own.
They know that any attempt to increase the amount or quality of information about them could be used as a means to form judgments about how well they're doing their job. That could lead to increased competitive pressures, uncomfortable questions, and other various forms of that dreaded word accountability.
And so they embarked on a disingenuous campaign to conflate institutional privacy with student privacy. By pretending to stand up for the latter, they very effectively preserved the former.
This is not to say that privacy is not a real and abiding concern in the modern age of information. It seems like not a week goes by that you don't read some new and horrifying account of security breaches at private database companies, resulting in the release of your social security number, mother's maiden name, cholesterol level, and AMEX card to gangsters located in one or more former Soviet republics.
But the unit record proposal contained every security protocol imaginable, including strict limits on the use and release of the data and harsh legal penalties for any privacy violation. It would be a federal felony punishable by prison time to release the information, at a level actually stricter than releasing data from the IRS. Which, as it happens, is a good example of a government agency that's been gathering "unit record" data far more sensitive than someone's college major for a long time while by and large successfully balancing citizen privacy rights and the government's interest in information. The government is actually quite good at keeping information secret; in fact that's usually the problem.
We live in an era where all large organizations strategically gather data about themselves to understand how they work and improve the services they provide to consumers. Any private company will tell you that such analysis is an essential component of continued improvement and long-term viability. We also live in a country where many colleges and universities routinely fail to graduate 50 percent of their students, where less than half of all college graduates are proficient in tests of literacy, where students and parents are forced to choose colleges with virtually no solid information about which institutions will actually give them a high-quality education, where globalization competition for knowlege-based jobs is growing by the day.
In other words, we live in a world with a crying need for more information about our higher education system. And yet Congress appears poised to, with little discussion or fanfare, usher in a higher education information dark age by prohibiting the creation of a system that would gather that information. Such an action would be a victory for the narrow self-interest of private institutions, and a sound defeat for students, parents, and everyone else.
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