Big Brother could begin keeping a closer eye on how college students spend the government’s money if a plan to change the way data is kept for higher education statistics moves through Congress.
Colleges now report information about enrollment, tuition and financial aid to the government though Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System surveys, or IPEDS.
The mass reporting of information though IPEDS makes it easy for valuable information to slip through the cracks, said Mike Bowler of the National Institute of Education Sciences.
Bowler said problems frequently arise under the current system when tracking things like graduation rates for students who transfer to other schools.
“Something like 50 percent of students who earn degrees have attended at least two different universities,” Bowler said. “Almost 40 percent attend colleges in different states, and because states collect data differently, many of those fall through the cracks.”
An article released last month by the Poynter Institute for Media Studies said the change was prompted by President Bush’s administration, which wants colleges to become more accountable for students’ performance.
Bowler said the Department of Education is conducting a “feasibility study” to see if implementing a drastic change in data collection would help better track statistics. The new system would require colleges to track individual students using a “unit record” system.
A unit record system would allow the Education Department to better measure a university’s performance, according to the Poynter article. It would track information about retention, graduation rates, the actual amount students pay after financial aid.
But opponents of the system say keeping a national database with individual student records could raise privacy issues.
Sandra Walker, director of institutional research for the LSU Office of Budget and Planning, said she sees both sides of the issue.
“I know privacy is one of the major concerns,” Walker said. “But there are others, like people at two-year colleges, who would benefit from being able to track graduation rates at other institutions.”
“I would think the federal government would do everything to protect the privacy of students,” she said.
Walker said she does not think the current system is dysfunctional.
“I think IPEDS is working,” she said. “It is doing what it was intended for. I think the people who want to change it want it to do additional things.”
Bowler agreed that privacy is the major issue with the proposed change, which will await Congress’ approval before a trial run in the 2006-07 school year.
“It’s obviously a problem, and they will have to work hard to make sure [privacy rights] are not violated,” Bowler said. “They are planning to make sure no one group gets access to the entire database, in order to protect students.”
Bowler said the unit record system should not recall the same concerns that information gathered by the Homeland Security Department has in the past.
“This is just a way to improve the government’s gathering of information to get a real accurate measurement of graduation rates,” he said.