In June, the Secretary of Education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education put out a draft report proposing the creation of a national database to track information about individual students such as financial aid standing, for students at the nation's colleges and universities.
In March 2005, the National Center for Education Statistics put out a study examining "the feasibility of collecting individual enrollment and financial aid information for each student in postsecondary education."
The study examined both whether or not such a system could be and should be implemented. In the end, the study found that "this system would, for the first time, give policymakers and consumers much more accurate and comprehensive information about postsecondary education in this country."
While the study concluded that such a system would be a valuable asset, Kent Willis, executive director of the ACLU chapter in Virginia, does not support the creation of such a database.
"The ACLU is opposed to the expansion of databases containing information about people in the United States," he said. "The government has no business crating databases that contain private information about individuals in the United States. [In the past] when the government has information like this it has tended to abuse the privilege."
Wills added the ACLU is concerned about the potential for identity theft arising for the storage of a large amount of personal information in one place.
"If this information leaks out or is stolen and it get into the wrong hands then the government is aiding identity theft," he said.
Kevin Carey, research and policy manager for Education Sector, said the new proposal would not represent a substantial change. The new draft proposal is simply suggesting that the individual colleges and universities submit all the data they have previously entered in different studies into one centralized database in which the data would be cross-referenced by students' social security numbers. The National Center for Education Statistics has been collecting data from all colleges and universities into a national database for quite some time, he added, and that process has been somewhat inefficient.
"The process has been around for a long time. [But] it is a pretty labor intensive process [to] add up information on the institutional level," Carey said.
Carey said he believes that one central database would be both more efficient and cheaper in the long run. He added that such a database would allow the Department of Education to calculate more accurate data.
"The important thing to understand is although the data would be collected as individual student data, [the Department of Education] would be prohibited from releasing the individual data," Carey said, because of existing FERPA regulations, or Family Education Rights and Privacy Act, a law that protects the privacy of student education records.
While officials at private universities, such as Katherine Will, president of Gettysburg College in an editorial in The Washington Post, have spoken out against the proposed database, Carey claims that public universities support this plan.
While the University has no taken an official position on the matter, George Stovall, director of institutional assessment and studies, said he does not support the creation of such a database.
"I think it's a bad idea," Stovall said. "I think it's overkill. I think it's dangerous to collect all this information and put it in a spot where it can possibly get out."
Stovall said he feels the individual studies conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics are a better way to track institutional performance. But, he does see some potential benefits to the creation of a single database.
"There would be some benefits to this sort of database," he said. "It would be a little bit easier to track students through their entire career through higher education. The question is whether or not it's worth it. Is it worth the money and the additional burden that it will be put on the institution?"
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