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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."
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
After all, aren't they the ones indoctrinating our future leaders with all this nanny-state nonsense?
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
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.
We could call it "No Behind Left Behind."
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?
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.
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?
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?
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.
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
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?
Right on.
In America we spend money on vaccines for small pox and Anthrax and we don't have enough flu vaccine.
In America we are going to spend hundreds of millions on a nationwide grid of biochemical warfare sensors.
In America we will spend $200 billion and counting on a misguided war in Iraq instead of on education and research.
In America we overturn the theory of evolution in favor of creationism and try to claim the Grand Canyon is a few thousand years old and was created by the great flood.
I always wondered what it would be like to live in the Dark Ages.
@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.
Well the Reagan administration and the CIA pretty much did create them in the 1980's to fight a proxy war against the U.S.S.R in Afghanistan when. Its something they did exceptionally well since they tied a superpower, with vast military superiority, in knots for 10 years and started the collapse of the Soviet Union. The disaffected and disillusioned vets coming back from Afghanistan did more to bring down the Soviet Union than Reagan running his mouth and squandering money on defense. The few billion he pumped in to the Mujadeen in the Pakistan tribal areas, which included Osama, did more than all the rest put together.
Not sure I would link Al Qaida to the the U.S. government though you never know. You would think they would have managed to catch Bin Laden by now if they were trying.
I think they are probably more like a pet that's gone bad and bites the hand of the one who fed it. Manueal Noriega, former head of Panama was like that too. He was a CIA stooge until he turned on them and we invaded Panama to take him down. He is rotting in Federal pen now.
I will have to agree the Republicans and the Bush administration have benefited mightily from 9/11 and Al Qaida whomever they answer to. Bush was heading towards a truly mediocre one term presidency before 9/11 save him.
They couldn't have gotten away with any of shit they've pulled without it:
- Jacking defense and intelligence up to a half trillion a year
- The Patriot Act
- Invading Iraq
- Scaring the American people so bad that they reelected him despite a record of incompetence and abuse that has most of the world despising the U.S.
- Destroying our rights to due process i.e. arresting people indefinitely with out charges or trial and subjecting them to varying degress of torture.
And coming soon:
- National ID cards, if we are lucky, with RFID tags so we can all be tracked every minute
- Merging the CIA, NSA, NRO, DIA and part of the FBI in to one all seeing all powerful spying agency, free to spy on Americans and foreigners alike, that would be the envy of the old KGB and Richard Nixon.
- Changes in the Senate rules so they can appoint extremist judges with a simple majority followed by "rule changes" to eliminate the fillibuster so Democrats can't stop them from passing their extremist agenda. Once the courts are packed and the Democrats in the Senate castrated we will have a "democraticly" elected dictatorship.
@de_machina