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Feds Propose National Database of College Students
Dore writes "The Department of Education wants to collect personally identifiable information on all college students, including name, address, birth date, gender, race, and SSN. Privacy is assured. The No Child Left Behind Act, which holds primary and secondary schools accountable prompted this line of thinking. Now colleges should be held accountable. If you made it to college, you were not left behind, and further attempts at monitoring citizens should be."
Does America have any laws regarding compulsory education to a certain level?
If that exists and yet does not extend to college level, one has to wonder why this is being proposed.
Also I can't see any real benefits (eg. in terms of missing persons) of this scheme. Anybody would like to think up some?
Where does it end? I mean really.. Broadcast flags are one things, but keeping tabs on every person that enters college? That's insane..
Granted not a lot of people finish college, but a great deal start.. and the idea that the government feels the need to keep track of me in yet another way is outragious..
By the time we get to college, we're in charge of making sure we succeed, not the government
Looks like ole George Orwell was off by about 20 years.
No further legislation needed. (Also keep in mind we're talking about college students-- legal adults. Creating a No Child Left Behind-like database has more legal problems to consider.)
public school? i.e. community colleges- defensible.. private institutions? none of their damn business.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
If it's just to gather better statistics, wouldn't reporting data on just 5% of a college's students be enough? Of course, this would have to be the same 5% of students tracked through their whole academic careers, but that would be simple enough to do with a hash of SSN's.
If the government doesn't go for this proposal, I'd like to see a better reason for tracking students.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Kind of makes you wish we were back in the Reagan era, when abolishing the Department of Education was in the Republican platform.
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
From the article: "The idea, proposed by a research wing of the Department of Education, is designed to improve federal oversight of students' enrollment rates, graduation rates, and tuition. Currently, that information is provided only in summary form by universities, leaving gaps in national college statistics. When students transfer from one college to another, for example, they show up in the federal rolls as dropouts."
Apparently, metrics on student graduation rates are the lifeblood of our government. We can't tolerate even small inaccuracies.
(Of course, we can tolerate small inaccuracies in, say, our voting system. But that's just a different story.)
I can't imagine any legitimate purpose for this. Even if you argue that the government allocates public university funding based on education rates, the aggregate metrics generated by each institution should be more than sufficient. If a university isn't providing accurate data, then you need to force it to comply - not usurp its job with hideous spyware.
I imagine that the real purpose is to track foreign students at American universities. In fact, the government does have a legitimate purpose in monitoring, say, Iranian exchange students who are studying nuclear physics. But I can't imagine why they wouldn't bolt that duty to visa enforcement, rather than just brazenly spying on the population.
- David Stein
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
No Child Left Behind is not useless; it is worse than that. Paying for all these programs winds up sucking the funding out of accelerated/gifted programs. No Child Left Behind becomes No Child Gets Ahead - and the brightest kids mentally drop out of school because it's nothing but boring.
of spending tax dollars on something. You stick your mouth in the government trough, and the government sticks its microscope up your ass. And enough with the "private" colleges. They get much (and in a lot of cases, most) of their money from various government handouts, whether it's research funding, tax breaks on land and buildings, government-subsidized or -guaranteed student grants and loans, or a ton of other sources. You take the Man's money, the Man is gonna get his money's worth out of you.
"Wow. Now THAT'S a lot of angry Indians." - Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer
What a bunch of stupid responses here. "To improve accountability". "RTFA". Nonsense. RBTL (Read between the lines).
My bet is that the primary goal here is to track down draft-age men and women; specifically those who were smart enough not to enter into the draft database by voluntarily registering.
Another clear goal is to make it easier to keep tabs on dissendents. Colleges are usually the first place where protests happen; so it makes it a lot easier to identify and keep tabs on the troublemakers.
My, the government sure is going all out to gather and centralize all this data about the people it supposedly represents. I wonder what for?
As a former public school teacher, I can tell you that by the time they're 16 they're plenty able to cause trouble. And if they want to drop out, it's very unlikely that forcing them to stay in will cause them to learn anything. The only reason to keep them in would be as a public-funded baby-sitting service, and I can think of better ways to spend our tax money. Sometimes I think that we should let them drop out in 9th grade (I taught 9th grade physical science - a general/remedial level science course - my last year as a teacher, and it was no coincidence that it was my last year. I have a tremendous amount of respect for teachers that keep at it year after year after year.). However, some of the kids in 9th grade, might actually straighten up. Those who are 16, however, are very unlikely to straighten up by 18. Once they've been out in the "real world", there is a slightly greater chance that they will see the errors of their ways, in which case they can go to night school and/or get their GED.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
The more education you have, the more likely you are to actually think about what the federal government is doing. That makes you a problem by definition. Clearly, the government needs to keep track of people like that. They need a list of people to round up as soon as habeus corpus gets suspended during the next national security emergency.
I think I started out to be sarcastic with this. The more I look at it, the less sure of that I am.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
"For example, over a third of students transfer colleges at least once, and 20 percent transfer twice or more, according to the American Council on Education. Yet under the current data collection system, these students are marked as dropouts and never counted as a graduate of any school." I wonder how they got these statistics.
OMG your so right .
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He thinks its bad in college, wait til he gets out in the real
world and "they" realize he is a work horse, and that is how they
will treat him
The ol' Sled Dog routine as I call it
Anyone that thinks they can off load some job on him will try
it direct and if that does not work they go suck up to your
boss and get him to pan it off on you
I used to have the work hard ethic while in corporate america
but put it on hold eventually in companies where this
pass the buck routine was rampant
Now that I own my own business, I can work hard, and only I am
gonna dump work on myself, and at least I get credit for it
Good Luck to all college students about to enter the work force
Consulting or Incorporation is the way to go , get your
tax deductions up front, and shelter your income
Peace !
Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Or make that "Privacy is assured" until we feel like leaking the details of your kid as a political weapon. But of course nobody in power would do a dirty thing like that...
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
I wonder who needs to be aware of the fact the kid graduated college to begin with. When that graduate out of this mythical 20% goes to apply for a job (or Grad. school), they're going to know where they graduated from, and be able to supply the interviewer with transcripts, certifications and degrees. This system is completely unnecessary, since grads already supply this information to the relevant people. Absolutely no need to get some huge database involved.
Cough, draft, cough....
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
I just thought it was interesting that the article cites these statistics about college students, then the very next sentence states that these very statistics cannot be captured without a tracking database.
Yes, but there may be more to this than you think.
... they basically stole it, and not just from the U.S. But, it's a hell of lot easier to come here and ferry knowhow home that it would be from a lot of other places: we're pretty much a goldfish bowl in that respect. I'm not demeaning the engineering prowess of China's technologists, per se, but let's face it: they came a very long way in a very short time and didn't do it all by themselves. They bootstrapped themselves from our hard-earned investments and are now using it against us in what amounts to economic warfare. Not the actions of a friendly trading partner, or even a good neighbor, internationally speaking. A lot of Slashdotters hold America accountable for its brand of economic imperialism, but China is proving to be even more formidable in that regard. Once America has been brought to its knees ... the rest of you better watch out. Economic imperialism may be the least of your worries.
Terrorist threats aside, there is a lot of stuff being blatantly ripped off by Chinese students and professional technical people. China is "economically ascendent" (i.e. "becoming a high-tech society") but they sure as hell didn't do it all by themselves: neither did Japan for that matter. We gave Japan their head start after the Second World War but we made no such gift to China
I know a company where a Chinese engineer was hired during development of a significant piece of technology. He worked there until the project was completed, then stole the prototype and flew home to China the same night and gave it to a manufacturer on the Chinese mainland (where it turned out he was still employed.) Frankly, that should have been an international incident, but I assume the management of that company didn't want the embarrassment. I know several other similar cases (I was in and out of a lot of places as a consultant for many years.) Obviously Chinese immigrants to the U.S. aren't much of a terrorism threat (the Chinese engineers I know are generally damn good, but are hardly terrorists), but I certainly do see some of them as being very capable (and culpable) with regard to industrial espionage.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
This is a really great extension to the program to insure top flight undergraduate and graduate students from around the world stop coming to the U.S. Last I heard they are already opting for places like Toronto and Oxford since its already really hard to get a visa to the U.S. and once you get here you risk being arrested and held indefinitely, without due process. Having no assurance of due process part used to be something you could only say about dictatorships, who would have though we would be saying it about the U.S.
Here is a two step program to crater your economy:
- Let your primary and secondary education system crater(bad underpaid teachers, promoting everyone, huge dropout rate, prioritize athletics and athletes over academics).
-Drive away all the top flight well educated foreign students and professors America has become so dependent on especially in science and tech.
Al Qaida's plan to destroy America seems to be working pretty well, launch one spectacular attack and let brain dead politicians and law enforcement officers do the rest of the damage as they seek to make everyone "safe".
@de_machina
This is paranoia. They can't tell who made it to college and who didn't if they don't know one or the other. It'll be hard to collect the identities of kids that didn't go to college, wouldn't it? So they have to get the names of those who did.
The question isn't one of logistics as you seem to indicate, it's one of privacy. For example, it would be hard to collect the names of people who didn't go to a gay pride parade, so therefore they *have to* collect the names (and SSN, and birthday, and...) of those who did.
The real issue isn't "What's the best way to collect it?", the issue is "Why the hell is the government collecting this information?" Universities and colleges already know who their students are, given that students have to enroll. But why should the government start collecting lists? Churches and synagogues know who their members are too, but the government doesn't so let's start listing out all synagogue members. No Jew left behind either!
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
And how do you think the US amounted to anything? Yup, by flounting international copywright and patent law. In the early days, the US ripped technical feats off, and sold un-royaltied literature at cheap, cheap (warez-ed) prices. That is how countries get started.
So get off your high horse, because that is how all industrial nations (except britain, who had the first mover disadvantage...go read your economics books) started.
As to the rest of your xenophobic post...wow, you really don't get how the world works. Or has worked for the past couple of centuries.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
What does personal student information have to do with measured results and performance? University performance statistics are already readily available.
What?
Because they turn in to PhD's and top flight scientists, technologists and thinkers and its desirable to get them to stay in your country, especially when your education system is cratering and you don't have enough natives to fill these roles.
.... heh ... what a country.
I can kind of see your point though. America is fast moving beyond the point it needs or wants people who think, reference a recent Tuesday in November.
Its a really big thing lately in the media to cover the religious right as they use their new political clout to try to undo the theory of evolution, geology and science. They forced the people who run the Grand Canyon book store to include a book that claims the Grand Canyon is a few thousand years old and was created by the great flood
America is in for a world of hurt as it continues to rush to abandon science in favor of religious zealotry.
@de_machina
(2) It feeds our skilled workforce. Many people who are educated here elect to stay. If you agree that top-flight people are worth having around, than this is good.
(3) It facillitates idea exchange. Folks at school learn from each other, sometimes more than fromtheir professors. I can't think of a downside here.
(4) It builds international connections. People who went to school together tend to stay in contact. They make business deals, diplomatic relations, and generally help countries understand each other.
If that really isn't enough for you, look to history for what happens to nations that become myopic. Don't think it won't happen here, unless you're prepared to explain how the U.S. is different from every other empire in history.
I forget what 8 was for.
We can't say the politicians should do something about our poor education, but then flout every attempt they make with these paranoid attacks.
Our K-12 education is broken. Our university systems work very well. We have the best universities in the world. Look at the list of top 50 universities. Look at the number of international students who study at universities in the US.
While K-12 education in the US is very poor, university education is very good. Why? The political process has (mostly) left universities alone while they (local school boards, state boards of education, federal agencies, etc.) have been making public education a political football. If you want to ruin undergraduate and graduate education and academic research in the US, simply let the government become more involved in the university education system.