Higher Ed Hypocrisy

We live in a time of information abundance. It's now possible to track and record most of what happens to an individual student over their entire educational lives, from the time they enter kindergarten to the day they graduate from college, and beyond. This isn't something we could do, it's something a growing number of states are doing, right now. So the real sticky issues aren't technical but normative: Who should control this information? How should it be used? How do we balance the obvious benefits for understanding and improving educational systems with individual rights to privacy?

All of these issues surfaced a couple of years ago, when the U.S. Department of Education proposed modernizing its long-established systems of gathering information about individual colleges and universities, in a way that involve gathering privacy-protected data about individual students. But instead of engaging in a serious conversation about the issues above, the association of private colleges went into full-blown the-apocalypse-is-nigh mode, shouting "Big Brother" from every available rooftop and getting Congress to include language in the soon-to-be-enacted Higher Education Act that would make the system illegal.

Yet at the very same time they were recruiting guileless students to joing their alleged crusade on behalf of student privacy, the private colleges were happily sending privacy-protected data about those same students to a massive national database of individual college student records. This one just happens to be run by a non-profit organization founded by the student loan industry. To be perfectly clear: I think there's nothing wrong with the organization, which is called the National Student Clearinghouse. But its very existence shows just how hypocritical the private colleges have been. This is the subject of my new column in InsideHigherEd, published today.

This, by the way, will be a regular gig. The column now has a title, "Outside the Circle," and will be published twice a month at InsiderHigherEd, with a home where past columns can be accessed and read. Of course, at some point in the future--my best guess at the moment is late November, early December--I'll have exhausted my mental list of higher ed-related grievances, so if you have ideas for columns that I can steal use, please send them my way.