Law permits access to student records
By Jake Greenberg
Jan. 13, 2012 2:03 a.m.
UCLA can now release students’ personal information to state and local agencies interested in analyzing the education system because of a federal policy change in the way universities archive data.
Amendments to the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, which took effect Jan. 3, allow the university to decide whether researchers can access records kept on file by the registrar, including records kept since kindergarten. The changes bring into conflict the importance of student privacy and the need for accurate data available to education analysts.
The privacy act is a bundle of legislation that deals with information accessibility and protection. For example, the act is what prevents students’ parents from accessing their grades without approval. In the past, the privacy act prevented someone from accessing all the information a university has on record.
In December, however, the Department of Education amended the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act by allowing universities to release data to local and state agencies. They can then use the data to determine the effectiveness of certain classes or other trends in education by looking at grades and passing rates, said Frank Wada, UCLA university registrar.
More specifically, the data can be used to tell if a particular class has an unusual grade distribution, or if there are certain trends among a particular graduating class, said Barmak Nassirian, the associate director for external relations of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers.
In 1974, in the aftermath of the civil rights movement, Congress passed the act to give people access to their own records so they could verify the information was accurate and portrayed them in a fair light. The measure was originally passed to guard against discrimination.
The privacy act protects most personal information such as grades and GPA. However, “directory information,” such as name, phone number and address that could be found in a phone book, are free for the public to access, Nassirian said.
Under the new amendments, the university has the right to release information that it was previously required to keep private.
“We are now able to release records to the state so they can determine the effectiveness of the public education system and UCLA specifically,” Wada said.
UCLA will often defer to the Office of the President to determine in what cases it should release student information, he added.
Students, however, can still restrict the type and amount of information released to an outside party.
Similar to how students can determine what information they want posted in the UCLA directory, the UCLA registrar’s office allows students to increase their privacy levels, said Brenda Moore, an administrative specialist in the UCLA registrar’s office.
The new changes to the privacy act do not mandate that data be released to certain groups.
Decisions about what information is released and to whom remain in control of UCLA and each university. The provisions simply allow UCLA to release information if it is asked, Wada said.
Nonetheless, the new changes have some people concerned because of its privacy implications.
Releasing data that the registrar maintains can quickly dissolve into a significant invasion of privacy, Nassirian said.
“We’re talking about the first step to cradle-to-grave tracking,” he said. “We have data about everything from what grade you received to what purchases you’ve made in the student union to what you’ve checked out at the library to whether you had a pregnancy during high school.”
Furthermore, the data collected about students is not required to be deleted and therefore is in “the system” forever, Nassirian said.
This means that youth criminal activity that is usually expunged from the criminal justice system when a young adult turns 18 remains in many databases and is not erased at all, he said.
The registrar, however, is very particular about what information is released only to official entities, Wada said.
In fact, the registrar’s office has yet to receive a single request for student data, but that could be because the measures just went into effect, he said.
