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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...
Crispin
No Child's Personal Information Left Behind
See! With the Republicans in charge, we can be positive that States and Localities will gain strength and that the federal government's power is limite....oh, wait. Never mind.
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.
After all, aren't they the ones indoctrinating our future leaders with all this nanny-state nonsense?
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
This is bad move by the US Department of Education. Much of this information is uneeded. I quote from the article:
Under the new system proposed by the National Center for Education Statistics at the Department of Education, each student enrolled in college would have a computer record that included name, address, birth date, gender, race, and Social Security number. It would then track field of study, credits, tuition paid, and financial aid received and would follow the student if he or she transferred or dropped out and later reenrolled.
Why does name, address, birth date, gender, race and Social Security have to do with this obstensible goals? An anonymous survey could be effective to gain whatever information they can possibly hope to gain from this system. They seem to be concerned with transfer students, but these could just be tracked without private information being encoded in a databse! This is a rediculous move, and probably just another move for a more complete database of civilian's private information.
Perhaps some staticians could shed some light on what this study hopes to achieve, and why personal data is required?
"There's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all."
- Bob Dylan
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!
As long as
1. It's searchable by name, location, major and gender
2. It includes pictures
3. You can rate each person
I say we just grow up, be adults and die.
It makes sense, when you think about it. How many people who voted for Bush could possibly be affected by this scheme?
[o]_O
Having over 6 teachers in my immediate family and once concidering the profession. no child left behind is a useless inititive. Why have a program that looks great but puts requirements on schoool programs without giving them the funding to reach said goals. The problem has never been documenting who gets behind, but ensuring that the school budget gets funded and passed before you fund prisons and roads. getting back to the problem why doesn't the government solve the public school problem before they take on colleges.
How about a national database for tracking when everyone uses the restroom. We could put little sensors on all toilets to track how often they're flushed!
There is a prototype here.
- shadowmatter
How about a national database to track everytime someone's information is tracked. Oh, and we'll need one to track every time someone tracks someone who is tracking someone. I think that should cover it.
A modern day witchhunt.
I have a friend that teaches in the New York City school district as a teaching fellow. They bring in recent college graduates and assist them in becoming teachers. Why? Because few people want to do the job.
He loves teaching. Through high school he coached younger kids in soccer. He has a rare gift for it.
He hates his job. There aren't books for the kids. There isn't paper for the copiers - unless he buys it. Basically, he has no materials for the majority of the classes he teaches.
His school is being punished by NCLB. They have reduced funding because they have not met minimum test score standards. Why haven't they? Because their students come from poverty and the school itself is underfunded. There are four computers in his classroom - no mice or keyboards, all broken and never replaced. How can you expect the students to be serious about education when you're not serious about giving them one? They know its a joke - they know rich kids go to schools with books and paper and they have nothing.
If you fail to meet minimum testing standards, you are given a bit of money, as any NCLB proponent will point out. This money is for basic math and reading courses. Funding for nearly all other programs is revoked. This means that teachers begin teaching for the test as to try to get their funding back. Teaching for tests is short sighted and ultimately doesn't teach the higher order thinking needed to advance in life.
He is not a teacher but a disciplinarian. He is forced to spend his time with problem students rather than helping and rewarding the good ones.
While NCLB has the nice ideal of encouraging better schools, it ultimate takes money away from those that need it the most. It further emphasizes the lack of access to education that the poor suffer.
This might be semi off topic, but I think people should know waht NCLB is like from the inside.
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
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.
I propose every foreign student where an emblem in their chest marking which country they come from. It would make it easier for the government to track these people. After all, what if even one of them is a terrorist?
US students, of which nobody will ever be a terrorist, should be tracked for other reasons like to figure out what will become of them once they grow up and whether the investment on them has paid off. I propose we implant an RFID tag under the scalp of each US student. That way the Government could easily scan them at every opportunity.
It is important that we know what young people do with their lives. After all, they could become terrorists some day! Or eat children! Or even, heaven forbid, violate copyright laws! We MUST know what they're up to.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
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 every university I know of sends a copy of your grade card to parents if they're paying for the schooling and request the updates.
Government does subsidize higher education, saving students billions every year.
These are our tax dollars that they're shipping off to universities and I think we (the tax payers) do have a right to know what's being done with it.
If a university has a 75% drop-out rate should they be funded the same as, less then or more then a university with a 5% drop-out rate? That's worthy of debate, something not possible without this data.
We could call it "No Behind Left Behind."
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.
At the university where I teach, there is an employment rule preventing dicrimination based on physical or mental ability. Yup, I said mental ability. Welcome to this side of the academic looking glass.
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?
Here in Finland and other countries in northern Europe we have a long tradition in collecting everything in databases. University students get into several databases which include personal information like name, age, parents, social status, cell phone number. Actually everything but hair color.
I just can't see any problem. There is no privacy to lose any more. Why should I care about federal registers while credit card companies know everything I buy, my ISP knows where I spend my time and those smart fellows who keep closest APT repository online know my favorite editor. Probably I couldn't even do moon shine without getting into dozen registers.
We are filed way beyond anything my glorious filehappy homeland can imagine.
Isn't it nice?
No Citizen Left Unwatched
Coming soon to a Congress near you! (Only available within the US.)
Some of those foreigners are pretty suspicious. Take my roommate, for example. He's from Japan and speaks very little English. He hangs out alot with a Jamaican that lives across the hall. He's Japanese, yet he never plays my Gamecube. Not only that, but he's never played DDR! Something is strange here...he's not fitting my stereotype...
... the government promises not to do anything bad with the list?
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.
Of course, the problem there is that opting out of the federal money doesn't decrease the federal taxation level. A state opting out of those funds would have to raise its own taxes to provide the equivalent service. The net effect is an increase in taxes on the population of the state which is hard to sell under the the banner of decreased federal oversight.
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"
Yes, I agree. With China economically ascendant and the US hooked on Asian debt relief, it will be helpful to know the names of our future bosses.
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.
Well, now I'm DEFINITELY not going to college.
Obviously intended as flamebait, but such a database exists: SEVIS - Student and Exchange Visitor Information System
The Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS) is a web-based system for maintaining information on international students and exchange visitors in the United States. Administered by the Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP), a division of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the largest investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
SEVIS is designed to keep our nation safe while facilitating the entry and exit process for foreign students in the United States and for students seeking to study in the United States.
To Americans today, "keeping our nation safe" is synonymous with trusting government to act in our best interests. How have so many failed to learn the lessons so clearly taught by our nation's founders, that the government is the enemy of liberty?
Gary Dunn
Open Slate Project
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?
Please, leave me here, behind. I feel safer when you're in front of me.
Sincerely,
Jame
Well, USA is fighting a "terroisom war" and Iraq is quite a mess, with a possible invasion of other "rogue countries" like North Korea.... so the college student database is a great aid to draft people into the army.
Well, unlike Nam's time, people who is smart enough getting into college will also be drafted to the military. Military needs a lot of electrical engineers and programmers too.
(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.
You are correct in this matter -- but the problem is that we'll never know who in the future will have that data. Yes, we're a Republic, but we still stand the chance of electing officals that are absolutely horrible to the populace. Hitler was elected by the populace! That crap can and has happened. The less information the Federal government has the better.
They absolutely must prove that under no circumstances can they do their jobs without said data for me to reliquish it.
Nowhere in the Constitution is education mentioned. They have NO business in it and they have NO reason to collect data on the matter. I don't want the feds knowing what college classes I took, what guns I may own, what my sexual preference is, or how much money I made. It's none of their damned business frankly.
I think this sentiment is a big reason why most of the US population, ufortunately, and the world at large, fails to understand WHY privacy/liberty advocates rally against the above bullcrap.
Simply put Federal government is a problem by it's very nature. If you disagree I would urge you to read the Federalist Papers and the Anti-Federalist papers penned by the Founders of the US. The Anti-Federalists simply stated, through a series of papers, that the Federal government would grow out of control and gather more powers than delegated. The Federalists figured a strict Constitution would hold it in check. Well, the Anti-Federalists were right. An issue such as this wouldn't have even surfaces if they weren't.
We're not certain that such a violation would happen -- but it is a possibility. Are you certain that I would misuse your personal information? Well -- how about you fax over your bank records and receipts for everything you purchased in the past few months. I'll maybe help you sort out your budget. You're not certain I'll misuse the information after all. How about your diet and excersise schedules? Send 'em on over -- I'll aggregate the data to make a perfet diet/excercise routine for the populace after a while. It's for the common good, you know.
people will get used to it (for example: radar detectors cops use to catch speeders, phone wire taps the FBI has the power to setup), and not all at once... it'll just be the norm, even convenient at each little interval. But, take a snapshot of today, and compare it to 30 years from now, and you'll probably feel like you've stepped into a utopia novel without ever realizing that you were doing it.
Speak for yourself.
... for those who abuse this database.
Tag lost or not installed.
Demonstrate that we ever had any privacy. The days before massive databases were also the days before credit cards and faceless megacorps that could care less who you are as long as you pay on time. If you weren't a hermit or a pioneer, your doctor/banker/grocer/etc. all knew you personally. People who *didn't* know you personally wouldn't take significant risks with you until they did, or until they'd checked you out with "respected members of the community". The whole town knew who you were, and if they didn't like who you were, it was time to find a new town.
We probably have more real privacy today than ever before. Some people seem to want total anonymity, and that's never existed.