Should students be tracked?

Private colleges and the Department of Education are at loggerheads over a new national student database proposal, reports The Washington Post.

The Spellings Commission on Higher Education touted the idea of a national student "unit" tracking system in its draft report released last month. The idea, supporters say, is to force accountability by having colleges release such data as accurate enrollment figures and financial aid percentages, as well as graduation, transfer and dropout rates.

"Is there some reason to reverse three decades of [privacy] policy and go down this Orwellian road?" asked Christopher B. Nelson, the president of St. John's College.

Proponents of the program say that student identities would be protected by encryption and that critics are afraid to reveal those statistics.

"They're scare-mongering. I can't think of single con. The bottom line is that they are trying make this about student privacy, and it's about their own institutions' privacy," said Kati Haycock, director of the Education Trust, an independent advocacy group. Haycock is also a member of the higher education commission.

Currently, the House has put a prohibition on such a program attached to the Higher Education bill and the Senate took no action. But private institutions are afraid that The Department of Education will squeeze it into the legislation anyway.

The United States Student Association views the proposal "as a massive invasion of student privacy," according to the group's legislative director, Rebecca Thompson.

"It's cradle-to-grave tracking," said Rolf Wegenke, president of the Wisconsin Association of Independent Colleges and Universities. "It can easily be connected to other databases and be connected to basic freedoms."