What Private Colleges Don't Want You to Know

Let's say you're a long-established industry that enjoys enviable immunity from the rigors of the free market. Demand for your product is rock-solid, you don't pay corporate taxes, government subsidies pad your finances, you raise prices every year with relative impunity, and while your members compete with one another, barriers to entry are so high that no new competitors ever enter the market. The general public thinks highly of you, and you keep a tight lid on public information about your performance to make sure it stays that way.

Then someone comes along with a proposal that could potentially change some or even all of that, by creating new public information about how well you're actually serving your customers. How do you respond? Do you:

(A) Live up to your professed committment to the public interest by supporting the proposal, understanding that in the long run both your industry and its customers are best served by more honest information.

or

(B) Pay for a misleading public opinion poll in an attempt to kill the proposal before it ever sees the light of day.

If you're the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, the answer is definitely (B).

For the past year or so, NAICU has been leading the charge against the creation of a new federal higher education data system. For many years, all colleges and universities have been required to submit annual data reports to the U.S. Department of Education, detailing information about enrollment, financial aid, degrees awarded, graduation rates, and other factors. The process is the higher education equivalent of requirements that publicly-traded companies file quarterly financial results with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Unfortunately, the current data reporting system, called IPEDS (Integrated Post-Secondary Education Data System) is outdated and inefficient. Colleges and universities have to internally add up data about individual students into a series of separate, unconnected data reports. This greatly reduces the amount of information the reports can provide to the public. For example, while one survey shows the percent of students who graduate in six years, and another shows the percent of students who receive Pell grants, the two can't be linked to show the percent of Pell grant recipients who graduate in six years.

IPEDS recently proposed modernizing the system by consolidating the various reports into a single, streamlined process, whereby institutions would simply submit one report with all the neccessary information tied to data about individual students, called "unit records." That would allow for both new and more accurate measures (like the previously mentioned graduation rates for lower-income students, or giving institutions credit for students who start at one institution and transfer to graduate elsewhere). While the data would be transmitted and stored as unit records, public information about individual students would never be disclosed, protected by long-established federal privacy laws and secure data systems.

The associations of public universities largely supported the proposal because--well, because it's obviously a good idea, a modernized data submission process and more abundant, accurate information for the public.

NAICU, on the other hand, fought the proposal from day one. For them, increased transparency and greater public information apparently warrants opposition on general principle. Higher education lobbyists successfully convinced the House of Representatives to pass legislation banning the unit-record system earlier this year. But the Secretary of Education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education recently released a draft report endorsing the unit-record system. Thus, the poll results released today.

The poll seems to indicate strong opposition to the system. But as is always the case when interpreting polls commissioned by parties with a vested interest in the results, it's crucial to examine the wording of the questions. The first question was:

The federal government has proposed a system where colleges and universities would be required to report individual student’s academic, financial aid, and enrollment information. This data would be linked to individual students through a unique identifier, and potentially to information from the student’s high school and elementary records. Would you support or oppose requiring colleges and universities to report individual student information to the federal government?

This question makes the intent of the survey clear, by (1) failing to mention that the information would be kept strictly confidential, and (2) asserting, appropos of nothing, that the information could "potentially" be linked to K-12 records, even though nothing in the proposal itself suggests anything of the sort.

The second question was:

Statement A: (Some/Other) people say that having more detailed information about college students would promote greater accountability for colleges and universities.

Statement B: (Some/Other) people say that enough data is already collected at the college and university level, and that reporting individual data is a breach of privacy that could result in abuses of people’s personal information.

Which statement do you agree with more?

Like question #1, question #2 is two is designed to elicit negative reactions to an unsupported, hypothetical problem. Release of almost any personal information of any kind "could" result in a breach of privacy and "could" result in some kind of abuse, the question is whether such an outcome is intended or likely in any way.

The third question was:

Statement A: (Some/other) people say that collecting data on individual students makes colleges and universities more transparent, so people can see if these institutions are being well-managed.

Statement B: (Some/other) people say that collecting individual student data is just costly and intrusive and does not address or solve any pressing public policy issue.

Which of these positions comes closest to your own position?

This question goes directly to the rhetorical bait-and-switch driving NAICU's opposition to the unit-record system. The proposed system was not designed as a way to monitor and study individual students. It's designed to monitor and study individual institutions. NAICU has cleverly conflated student privacy with institutional privacy.

Moreover, the idea that there are no "pressing public policy issues" addressed by the new information the system would provide is simply incorrect. There are many, most of which are documented convincingly in the Commission's draft report. They deal with the failure of many higher education institutions, including the members of NAICU, to provide students with the high-quality education they need. It is the unwillingness of those institutions to be held accountable for those failures that lies at the heart of their opposition to the unit record system.

In a press release accompanying the poll results, NAICU President David Warren said:

“It is ironic that we are considering such an assault on Americans’ privacy and security in the shadow of the Fourth of July, when we celebrate the American values of freedom and choice.”

The fact that NAICU would go so far as to frame this as a security issue, in this day and age, shows just how entrenched their opposition to transparency and accountability really is. If anyone on the the Commission needed convincing that they must take a strong stand on behalf of more transparency and public information for students and taxpayers, this misleading, self-serving poll surely provides all the evidence they need.