Fed Ed Agency Wants Student Data

Private information about individual students may be included in a federal database if a Department of Education plan to improve college accountability is approved by Congress.

Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings said Tuesday that a database drawn from information about specific students would provide high schoolers and their parents with better consumer information about colleges.

The proposal has sparked controversy among higher education advocacy groups, who argue that the benefits of using individual student data are unclear, while the risks to privacy are perilous.

“What the student database would do is require institutions to give that information to the federal government—with or without the students’ consent,” said Tony Pals, a spokesman for the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, of which Harvard is a member.

Harvard’s director of federal relations, Suzanne Day, said the details of the proposal have yet to be announced, but that the requested data about individuals might include information about how long it takes students to graduate, how much students pay out-of-pocket, and whether students transfer between colleges.

While Harvard and other institutions already give some student statistics to the Department of Education, the release of individual data would likely require Congressional approval, Day said, since student privacy is protected by law.

In her speech Tuesday, Spellings promised that student data would be “closely protected,” and that individuals would not be able to be identified through the database information, which would be made available on a public web site.

The database proposal emerged from a report released this August by the 19-member Commission on the Future of Higher Education, which explored ways to make higher education more available to all Americans and to make colleges more accountable for their educational quality.

Spellings announced several other new policies Tuesday based on the committee’s recommendations, including efforts to streamline and speed up the federal financial aid application process for high school seniors.

While Spellings said she would continue to work with Congress to increase student aid, she did not endorse the commission’s recommendation to increase federal Pell Grants to cover 70 percent of average in-state tuition costs, from its current level of 48 percent.

—Staff writer Lois E. Beckett can be reached at lbeckett@fas.harvard.edu.