Under a recent proposal being championed by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) within the U.S. Department of Education, a database collecting private statistics on all individual students enrolled in all colleges and universities in the U.S. would be used to evaluate the performances of these institutions. This proposal raises many privacy concerns because the government would now identify all college students by their Social Security numbers and be able to access their grades and on-campus activities.
The Department of Education currently collects statistics on trends of academic performance at post-secondary institutions without knowing anything about the individuals. For example, the NCES now collects aggregate data on enrollment, graduation rates, tuition costs, and financial aid. This current system allows the government to adequately evaluate institutions’ performances without knowing information about each individual student. The proposal seeks to convert the system to a student unit record data system in which data is collected on a student-by-student basis.
Not only would this change in how the government gathers statistics be costly for colleges and universities to implement but it also raises numerous privacy concerns.
Some of which include the misuse of personal student information by government agencies and the possibility that other agencies could illegally access the collected information. For example, the National Directory of New Hires, designed as a registry of workers who re-enter the workforce, has been misused by the government to track parents who fail to pay child support or who owe non-tax debt.
The proposal has no protections for student privacy and is vulnerable to identity theft. The National Center for Education Statistics is not equipped to protect the collected information from computer hackers. Are you comfortable with the federal government collecting such a large database of students’ Social Security numbers?
Database records could be kept indefinitely by the government and cross-listed with other databases, creating a semi-permanent lifetime profile of individuals not involved with or suspected of any crime.
As Bill Seltzer astutely noted in a letter to the editor in the New York Times on November 30th, despite the Department of Education’s claim that “information about individuals may NEVER leave N.C.E.S.,” this assertion is false. Section 508 of the PATRIOT Act allows the Attorney General, through a court order, to obtain any “reports, records, and information (including individually identifiable information) in the possession” of the NCES that could be pertinent to a terrorism investigation or prosecution. Do you really want the federal government to keep track of your activities, the clubs you join, and the grades you receive at college?
Aaron ScherbWashington, D.C.
