For Immediate release: February 3, 2022

Contact: Cassie Creswell, cassie@ilfps.org, 716-536-9313;
Leonie Haimson, info@studentprivacymatters.org, 917-435-9329

Parent Coalition for Student Privacy and Congressman Jamaal Bowman Oppose College Transparency Act to be Voted  Tomorrow

Overturning Federal Ban on Student Unit Record System Endangers Privacy and Equity

The College Transparency Act, now appended to the America Competes Act, is coming to a rushed vote today or tomorrow in the US House of Representatives.  This bill would overturn the long-standing ban on the federal government amassing a comprehensive database of personal student information, and instead would require that the US Department of Education collect the personal information of every student attending a post-secondary institution and potentially track them throughout their lives. There is no allowance for students to opt out of inclusion in this massive federal data system.

“The Parent Coalition for Student Privacy strongly opposes this bill and urges Congressional Representatives to vote against it, as any attempt to authorize the collection of such data by the federal government would create an unaccountable surveillance system that would place the privacy of all higher education students at an unacceptable risk,” said Leonie Haimson, co-chair of the Parent Coalition.

As one of the Coalition’s core principles, we hold that extremely sensitive personal student data should not be shared without consent, and especially without clear evidence that this is necessary. The CTA language would allow the government to not only collect data directly from colleges and universities for all full-time and part-time students, including their enrollment status, attendance, age, gender and race, but also to potentially include information pertaining to their “status as a confined or incarcerated individual”, disabilities, and/or first-generation college student.

The bill also allows the collection of nearly any other additional personal student data elements that can be justified as “necessary to ensure that the postsecondary data system fulfills [its] purposes”. This data will then be matched to other federal data from the Department of Defense, and Veterans Administration, the Census Bureau (for earnings), and the Social Security Administration, to continue throughout their lives.

“Our number one priority should be empowering our students with the resources they need to be well-rounded members of our society and influence positive change in their communities, not collecting their data and empowering the federal government to unnecessarily track them for the rest of their lives,” said Congressman Jamaal Bowman, Ed.D. (NY-16). “We have been down this road before and know how people’s personal data can be abused. Under the Trump Administration we saw this play out in the form of ICE stakeouts in our communities that put people in danger of being deported, separated from their families, and having their lives completely destroyed from one day to the next. The College Transparency Act raises serious concerns about how the data of our students can be used and abused. If making these systems more fair and equitable for all is our goal, there are interventions that would make a material, positive difference in people’s lives starting with canceling student debt.”

In recent years it has become clear that data held by local, state and federal agencies are under increased threat of breaches and cyberattacks. Even our “best protected” national data stores have been breached, including the well-known Education Department FAFSA breach in 2017, and top-secret NSA and Army data.

According to the US Department of Education’s own Inspector General’s  2020 data security audit of the Department, there were weaknesses in 11 of the 12 areas of their operations, which “did not meet the Managed and Measurable level of maturity or an effective level of security.”  The audit also found there was insufficient progress since previous audits: “We had findings in all eight metric domains within the five security functions—Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond and Recover…findings with the same or similar conditions identified in OIG reports issued from FYs 2017 through 2019.”

In addition, the College Transparency Act says in section (H) that “nothing in this paragraph shall be construed to prohibit third-party entities from using publicly-available information in this data system for commercial purposes.” Thus, companies could not only use the aggregate data for advertising, but also could match the data with other sources of data to exploit particular students and target them with ads.  Hackers could also combine with other databases for illegal purposes.

Lisa Rudley, the Executive Director of NY State Allies for Public Education and a school board member in New York pointed out, “Any college rating system that is developed from such a federal database may not just be subject to breaches, but also have unintended consequences, by discouraging schools from accepting the highest needs students – including those with disabilities or from low-income families.  Data of this magnitude and sensitivity needs to be handled with care and integrity.  We have not seen evidence of this from the US Department of Education.”

“The focus on earnings may also dissuade colleges from promoting career paths of great value to society but that typically yield lower salaries (e.g., early childhood or K-12 education) or discourage them from accepting students who on average may be relatively lower earners: female students, students of color, and/or pregnant or parenting students,” added Jeanette Deutermann, founder of Long Island Opt Out.

There are much less intrusive options that could be used to analyze and evaluate higher ed outcomes, including data sampling and use of aggregate data. See for example the recent Brookings report which used information drawn from the College Scorecard Data and the Opportunity Insights Mobility Report Cards. The Department of Education also already has access to vast amounts of data from their federal student loan system which could be used for similar analyses, but to our knowledge has not been employed for such purposes.

“Technology and data collection far out-pace the current federal and state protections for students. Congress should be seeking to strengthen those protections before engaging in further data collection that will potentially put our students at risk. We urge our Representatives to vote no on the College Transparency Act,” said Julie Larrea Borst, Executive Director, Save Our Schools NJ Community Organizing.

Another bill reintroduced in the last Congress, called the Student Right to Know Before You Go Act, would be far more protective of students’ sensitive data by employing a system called secure multiparty computation, which would enable these sorts of analyses without giving the federal government direct access to personal student data, as the American Association of State Colleges and Universities has pointed out.

“Why is any legislation being proposed to enable the government to collect more personal data before comprehensive data protection legislation has been enacted? There are several bills in Congress to do just that, but they have been stalled for more than a decade. To see the federal government rolling back protections of student privacy instead of bolstering them is very disheartening for me as a parent and student privacy advocate,” said Cassie Creswell, co-chair of the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy and director of Illinois Families for Public Schools.

Diane Ravitch, the founder of the Network for Public Education, said, “I urge Congress to vote NO on this bill. The federal government must continue to protect the privacy of students, rather than amass giant databases, full of highly sensitive information for the purposes of ratings systems, which by their nature will be highly unreliable and may have negative consequences for our most vulnerable students.”

###

Additional Resources

Cassie Creswell’s testimony on behalf of Parent Coalition for Student Privacy and Raise your Hand before the Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking, January 5, 2017

Cassie Creswell’s response to follow-up questions from the Commission, February 10, 2017

PCSP press release opposing the CTA, November 1, 2017

The College Transparency Act: What Are Future Use Cases of Student Data? EdTech Magazine. September 21, 2021

College Database Bill Raises Concerns About Student Privacy Inside Higher Ed. April 26, 2021

Despite Decades of Hacking Attacks, Companies Leave Vast Amounts of Sensitive Data Unprotected ProPublica January 25, 2022