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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."
Oh? Well, that certainly clears things up, no privacy concerns then, its not like anyone bribeable will have access to it...
You can't take the sky from me...
After all, aren't they the ones indoctrinating our future leaders with all this nanny-state nonsense?
Actually that's the first thought I had. I assumed that this data could be twisted into a backdoor way to identify (RIAA) copyright infringers.
...and also to keep track of youthful men not registered with Selective Service.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
I've got news for you, bud. If not-so-little Johnny, who is now in college, doesn't live up to performance expectations, he'll be kicked out of the school after a semester. Then your problem will be solved - your tax dollars will no longer be sent to him.
You'll never have a complete say over where your tax dollars go, but this is one case where I think the inherent systems will succeed in assuring that the worthy receive your contributions. We don't need more restrictive measures put into place.
Almost everyone that's posted seems to think that they government is in no way entitled to this information.
The government spends billions every year on Higher education.
When I invest in something I expect to see measured results, on a regular basis. Don't you? So why is it unreasonable for the Gov't to expect this?
Furthermore, as a TAXPAYER, *I* am entitled to see statisitics about the performance of universities that I HELP FUND.
I might also find this information useful when choosing a University.
Revolution usually starts out at the university level. Look china and Tiananmen square protest or Kent State protetest during the vietnam war.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
My mother is a lead teacher for special education and has told me that this act applies to her children as well. Some of these children have IQ's below 60, and the school is held responsible for all of them (not just a percentage), passing the standardized tests.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Now, however, there is a movement in Washington, particularly among Republicans, to demand greater accountability from universities in exchange for the federal support they provide.
That ummm, who provides?
I don't want a university system that it tied to the agenda of our federal officials.
There is a cost to not monitoring individuals and I for one am willing to pay it.
well, if you assume that foreign/international students have to acquire student visas in order to come and study here, then they already are fairly effectively tracked, since the INS has been part of the dept. of homeland security for several years now. from what i've heard/observed, they're pretty strict on issuing them, and not much less lax on keeping track of them afterwards.
i'm slightly confused by their spurious argument; i understand how transfers would show up as dropouts in one column, but shouldn't they then show up as transfers in another? they say something about how students then end up not appearing to graduate from any institution...if these are school-reported statistics, then the school they graduate from would report that, right? i feel like i'm missing something here.
And if they want to drop out, it's very unlikely that forcing them to stay in will cause them to learn anything.
And not a few of us dropped out to avoid trouble and to improve our learning, took our GEDs and were in college a year ahead of our graduating class.
There are all sorts of valid reasons for leaving government school at 16, or even before that.
KFG
Remember 1939 to 1944 in germany and most of europe? The germans used IBM machines to count/tabulate EVERYONE and ANYDATA they could think of.
Their only bottleneck was the specific paper punch cards made by ibm which couldnt be 'cloned' very well, so IBM had the monopoly supply.
Anyway, German efforts in France were scuttled by some good French resistence (dont bag them, at least they DIDNT SELL the damn machines to Germany like USA did). The French resistence pretended to offer counting/tab services to the germans, but gave them fake info and used the machines for themselves to keep track of all the resistence groups/underground soldiers and what each one can do etc...
So gathering large amounts of info/stats on people can have a dual role for both evil and good against evil. Today with 1000000x more procesing power, everyone is basically property of the goverment as a 'resource' that supplies taxes.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
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.
When I was 16, I was about ready to drop out of high school. I wasn't learning anything useful, most of my teachers had bad attitudes, and I couldn't take any classes that actually interested me (apart from a visual art class with an excellent teacher). I had a 1.0 GPA my last semester at high school (3 0.0 and 1 4.0 averaged).
Fortunately, my state has a program that allows HS students to do their last two years at a community college, so I was able to learn about things like astronomy and logic, and take government and sociology courses from teachers who were interested in the subjects and knew how to teach them well.
I never got a four-year degree, but on my way towards one I got into IT and now I work as a systems engineer at a Fortune 500 company. I start school again in about a month (after a six year hiatus) to earn a BS and possibly go further in another field.
There are a lot of 16-year-olds who are genuinely uninterested in learning, but many of the people I knew had been failed by the public education system the same way I would have been without that community college program.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Part of the current act is that public schools are mandated to turn over personal information about students to armed forces recruiting so that no child will miss out on the oportunity to die in bushes fucked up war for oil. Parents who dont want their childern contacted must opt-out in order to keep their childerns from being inundated with calls and glossy pamflets.
The effort to create this database may be in response to the recent judgement that universities can deny access to military recruiters because of discriminatory practices against gays. This overturned a 1994 a defense authorization bill that allowed the goverment to withhold funding from public institutions that denied access to recruiters.
The hopeless war in iraq is making it more difficult to recruit a new generation of jarheads. Retention is down so they were forced to make do with a back door draft in order to retain enough personel to maintain our insufficient forces in iraq & afganastan. If bush starts a third war against Iran(with large oil and natural gas reserves), launched from our spiffy new bases in Iraq, we will need to dramatically increase the number of military personel beyond what can be build using volenteers. This new database will come in handy when the National Freedom Expanders Act is passed to compel military service unless you happen to be in a rich an powerful family in which case reporting for Patriot Duty is optional.
We have the best government that money can buy.
Also, as much as you instictively want to protect them from the big bad world, going too far could really screw them up. The super-sheltered kids I know are almost to the individual annoying, and have difficulty adjusting to new environments (i.e. college).
Ignorance kills, complacency kills, hatred kills, but usually not the ones guilty of them.
According to the Selective Service website the amount of kids "smart" enough to not register is about 6%.
And if that college is university is state run that number drops to 0%. Registering is mandatory if student is going to a school that's public.
Hollow words will burn and hollow men will burn.
It's not just graduation rates; it's also tuition. Granted it's not the lifeblood of govenment, but it is pretty critical these days. Tuition has gone up tremendously in the last thirty years- not so long ago, the most expensive colleges cost a few thousand dollars a year. Now we're talking fifty thousand. It's grown well beyond the rate of inflation and is one of the major problems that faces the US. The vast majority of this data is already available to the government anyway, because of the FAFSA. (Federal Application For Student Aid.) The main practical differences? (a) The very rich aren't exempt from government tracking of this data, and (b) It might be possible for law enforcement to circumvent certain federal regulations involving a school's disclosure of personal financial information. However, I'd imagine they can already do this...
You take for granted that those at the age of 16, who're trouble makers are lost causes.
s htm l?tid=99
You see them as babies and have little interest in caring about them, prefering to spend money elsewhere.
By chance did you ever read any of this ?
http://slashdot.org/articles/99/04/25/1438249.
It's your sort of attitude towards today's youth in highschool from teachers that brings about some of the above feelings and commentary within the aforementioned article.
FYI, Highschool is a special sort of hell. It's like a war of attrition, for the geeks as much as it is for every other student going through it as well. Being surrounded by teachers and school administrators who're out of touch with their students, as well as jaded about them being babies and lost causes is what draws out school violence when the students reach the breaking point of being unable to find anyone compassionate enough to understand their issues as well as work with them.
Do i suggest that it's an easy road? No, but one thing is for certain, it highlights how much more involved high school teaching is today, than just giving lectures to politely obedient students. Who only care about learning the subject matter. Who politely leave their personal lives outside the building.
Instead of being understanding or trying to, and working with the students you would rather cast them aside, letting them walk out into the harsh realities of life outside of school unprepared. Money better spent elsewhere.
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"That's the whole trouble. You can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful, because there isn't any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you're not looking, somebody'll sneak up and write 'Fuck you' right under your nose." - Chapter 25, pg. 204, Catcher in the Rye
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"There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness."- Friedrich Nietzsche
Here's a topic where its worth posting as an AC...
As an ex-programmer for a university, and then a major player in the higher education software application market, I have been involved in the creation of the REAL existing student tracking database. It is NOT FAFSA, and it DOES contain personal identification data. Any institution that receives grant or loan money from publically funded programs is REQUIRED to identify and report EVERY student enrolled at least once per enrollment period (semester/quarter). In the industry it is known as the Federal student loan clearinghouse. Its stated purpose is to insure against fraudulent applications, receipt, and use of student loan and grant monies. I assure you that the folks running the show weren't qualified to design the collection system, nor are they sophisticated enough to use it to track your association to terrorist organizations (except if you count U.C. Berkley to be one). I can also assure you that they HAVE prevented the federal loan and grant programs from funding your 7th-year freshman roommates sports-car purchase. Dont ask me to count how many times I've seen the junior with the 1.2 G.P.A. drop out in the third week of the semester and try to withdraw the $20,000 of student loan money they thought no-one would notice. Before you take to much pride in your tin-foil hats, ask around and find out how much they have collected from ex-students who CLAIM to be full-time students so they can delay the repayment of thier $60,000 in student loans. There are MILLIONS of reasons why both public and private instituions are willing to give this information up, and every single one of them has to do with making sure the federal funding of higher education doesn't look like the $300,000 toilets the pentagon uses to flush taxpayer money away.
(5) Due to visa restrictions, foreign exchange students may not be able to get jobs outside of the university therefore universities rely upon them for cheap labor.
*Note: My guess about student visa restrictions.
And Bush cries about Democrats embarking on pork barrel spending? The Department of Education doesn't need to get their hands in this. There are already companies out there who are doing it: they're called student loan companies. I'm sure you've heard of them (i.e. Sallie Mae, the biggest one ever!). They know everything about you, and they'll track you down if you try to run and hide. They make sure to know when you graduate, because that's when they start getting paid!
College students should worry about their privacy, because I know that Sallie Mae outsources their service/call center, and current laws are vague about the legalities of this. Imagine all your personal information accessible halfway across the world by god knows who? Sure the internet does this already, but how secure is Sallie Mae's systems? If the government wants to spend dollars where it's worth it, then spend it on auditing Sallie Mae and their practices, to ensure that students are treated fairly.
Linux at home
For that reason alone, when America gets involved in anyones' business, be it for good reasons or bad, people don't trust them. It would be different if America didn't abuse the trust of other nations.