The federal government is considering a major overhaul
of its higher education data collection system that would
require institutions like Johns Hopkins to submit
information on a per-student basis, a potentially costly
and privacy concern-riddled policy, warn some private
college advocacy groups.
Currently, JHU and other U.S. colleges submit summary
information once a year to the National Center of Education
Statistics on categories such as undergraduate enrollments,
graduation rates, tuition prices and types of financial aid
awarded. The information provided goes into the Department
of Education's Web-based Integrated Postsecondary Education
Data System, known as IPEDS.
In the proposed new "unit record" system, each school
would submit records on individual students, including such
details as Social Security number, gender, ethnicity, date
of birth, tuition, loans, grant awards, permanent and local
addresses, number of courses and number of credit hours.
The proposed system would ask institutions to submit data
on every enrolled student, both undergraduate and graduate.
Colleges would also need to track and report all changes in
a student's status, for example, whether the individual
switches from full time to part time. A student's Social
Security number would be used to match record files and
identify the individual. The data base would be used to
follow students who transfer to another institution. It
would also be used to verify enrollment status for
loans.
Advocates of the proposal are expected to seek to have
it included in the Higher Education Act reauthorization,
action on which is expected to be completed at the earliest
this summer. If passed, the current plan is to run in fall
2006 a pilot program of the new system wherein 1,200 to
1,500 colleges and universities will enter information into
IPEDS both the current way and in the new unit record
manner.
The stated purpose of the change is to calculate more
accurate graduation rates by tracking students
individually, in effect giving schools credit for the
students who leave one college but go on to graduate from
another institution. The new system would also allow the
Department of Education to calculate the net cost of
education, the figure after all financial aid grants are
taken into account, as compared to the advertised "sticker
price."
Cathy Lebo, director of institutional research at
Johns Hopkins, said that the technical challenges and cost
to implement and maintain this type of data collection will
be significant to Johns Hopkins due to the university's
decentralized nature; timing that coincides with the
implementation of
ISIS, the new student information system; and the
proposed reliance of Social Security numbers as
identifiers. The student records and registration component
of ISIS is scheduled to be implemented in summer 2006.
The unit record proposal constitutes a broad request
to collect data with inherent dangers to individual
privacy, Lebo said. How long will the data be kept? Who
will have access to it? And will the current legal
protection that safeguards student privacy, the Family
Educational Rights and Privacy Act, need to be radically
changed in order for any legislation to be passed?
"They are really asking for the right to collect data
on every student in the higher education system," Lebo
said. "Every time there has been a federal request for
information, it has been much more limited than this. There
has been a specific intent and a narrow limit on exactly
what they were allowed to collect and what they would use
it for. But now what the government wants is an unfettered
right to play with the data. That raises a lot of questions
for us — whether those with access to the information
will understand the nuances of the data, whether anyone
should have carte blanche to collect this sort of
information and what input into the conversation the
institutions themselves will have about how the data is
used."
Lebo said there would also be the potential to get
inaccurate interpretations of the data given that there is
no uniformity among higher education institutions in terms
of duration of academic programs, requirements for
graduation and other variables.
For example, the government will calculate one
graduation rate for all full-time undergraduate students at
Johns Hopkins, she said, despite the fact that Arts and
Sciences, Engineering and Peabody offer traditional
four-year programs while Nursing offers a two-year
upper-division baccalaureate program. Similarly, the
engineering curriculum is four years at Johns Hopkins but
may be five years at other universities.
"How is the federal government going to roll up one
answer for Johns Hopkins and understand it? The government
is already dealing with 6,000-plus institutions that
receive Title IV financial aid, and they don't want to
expand this number by taking into account the eight
academic divisions at JHU," she said. "Also, will Nursing
students be treated as transfer students and another school
given credit for their graduation at Hopkins? The unit
record proposal also broadens the scope of data collection
to include graduate students. How will start and stop
points be defined to measure the time to degree for
graduate programs?"
The proposal was brought up this past summer, Lebo
said, and in October and November technical review panels
were held to allow universities, state higher education
officials and education associations to comment on the
proposed new system. Lebo attended the second technical
review panel along with representatives from other major
public and private research universities.
Lebo said that to implement this new system would
likely cost Johns Hopkins millions of dollars and that a
new data warehouse would have to be created specifically
for this project.
"We would be switching from a report that happens one
time a year to multiple reports for every academic term
during the year," she said. "Every time a student changes
status, we would have to send a new record. A lot of data
would have to be shipped back and forth, and we would have
to reconcile all the records that did not match with the
federal database. They are asking us to build a live
transactional system rather than taking a single snapshot
of enrollment as they do now. It will require five to eight
times the work that we are doing now in reporting."
Costs and technical issues aside, the main concern for
universities is the privacy issue, Lebo said.
"The fact that the government will keep all this data
on students, even those who receive no aid at all, is
troubling. Just by virtue of going to college your
information will go into the database, and they will know a
lot about you. And will they release that information to
other government agencies?" Lebo questioned. "People are
going to say this is about accountability, but that is not
the issue here. The issue here is, Is it worth the cost to
collect this answer regarding a school's performance, and
will we know why the answer we get is either good or bad?
If two schools with students of very different academic
abilities have exactly the same graduation rates, then
which school is doing the better job? After a great deal of
effort and expense, we will know that one school had a
better graduation rate than another, but we will not know
why. The money used to implement this will have to come
from somewhere, and, in the end, will it be worth it? While
this proposal might be well-intentioned, there are
certainly a lot of issues for us to consider."
Currently, Johns Hopkins is working with the National
Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, the
Association of American Universities and the Maryland
Independent College and University Association to monitor
the proposal's legislative status and to martial support to
modify the proposed system by putting appropriate limits on
the data requests.
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