Private College Campaign Against Accountability, Contd.

The Washington Post ran an Op-ed yesterday by the Katherine Haley Will, President of Gettysburg College, criticizing the Secretary of Education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education for supporting a new, improved system of collecting information about the nation's colleges and universities.

I won't bore you with the whole back-story about how this is part of an orchestrated campaign led by private colleges to avoid being held accountable for whether or not they're doing a good job, having done so recently here and also a few months ago here. So just some additional comments:

If you feel like you've read this all before, you have: the same person ran essentially the same Op-ed on the same topic in the same place (the WaPo) last year, read it here if once just wasn't enough. She even managed to get the phrase "Big Brother" into both titles. Shouldn't there be some kind of policy against that, some sort of editorial statute of limitations?

The big misrepresenations in this piece remain the same as always: failing to mention that (A) Data about individual students would never be released in any form, protected by strict federal privacy laws established over 30 years ago, (B) The system is not designed to monitor students, it's designed to monitor institutions, and (C) Many higher education folks, including the major organizations of public universities, support the plan.

There are also some more specific misrepresentations of note. For example, the first graf says:

Does the federal government need to know whether you aced Aristotelian ethics but had to repeat introductory biology? Does it need to know your family's financial profile, how much aid you received and whether you took off a semester to help out at home?

The system wouldn't actually collect data about the grades you received in specific courses. It's never a good sign when you have to exaggerate and dissemble in the lead sentence of your piece to make your point.

Moreover, think about the question: "Does the federal government...need to know your family's financial profile" for a second. Of course, the federal government already does know that, because your family fills out a detailed series of forms every year with all kinds of information about income and spending and submits it to the IRS.

That data remains confidential and doesn't get used for any "Orwellian schemes" (her words) because to do so would be a federal crime punishable by time in prison--as would releasing data submitted under the system in question here. The Op-ed also says:

This proposal is a violation of the right to privacy that Americans hold dear. It is against the law. Moreover, there is a mountain of data already out there that can help us understand higher education and its efficacy.

What law does this proposal violate? Surely President Will can't mean the recent bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives banning the system, a bill that hasn't been passed by the Senate nor signed by the President. I hope this debate hasn't sunk to the point that it misses distinctions I learned when I was six years old watching "Schoolhouse Rock."

And to the claim that there is a "mountain of data" out there about higher education efficacy, here's an open challenge: Someone, anyone send me information that shows the following about Gettysburg College:

How much do students there learn between the time they arrive as freshmen and the time they leave as seniors? How does that compare to other colleges?

If you do, I'll publish it here along with an apology to President Will.