Big Brother is going to college: Federal plan tracks students for life

The so-called College Transparency Act, resurrected last month by the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, would empower the federal government to collect personal information on all students enrolled in higher education institutions without their consent and without any ability to opt out, according to Maggie McKneely writing in Washington Examiner.

Despite its stated purpose of increasing transparency in higher education, the legislation focuses exclusively on collecting private student data rather than information about the institutions themselves. The database would capture attendance status and intensity, programs of study, distance learning participation, credential-seeking status, race, gender, and economic background.

More troubling still, the bill includes a catch-all provision for other data elements that are necessary, effectively granting the federal government unlimited authority to expand the scope of surveillance at will.

Republican Opposition Blocks Earlier Attempt

Sen. Ashley Moody (R-FL) was the sole member of the Senate HELP Committee to oppose the legislation when it passed last month. The measure represents the second major push for the database scheme. In 2022, House sponsors attempted to attach the proposal as the Levin Amendment to China-related legislation, but House Republicans recognized it as governmental overreach and defeated it overwhelmingly.

That resounding rejection prevented the Senate from pursuing the measure that year. The current revival has caught many observers off guard.

Missing Information That Would Actually Help Families

The legislation fails to require disclosure of information that would genuinely assist parents and students in evaluating colleges. The database would not track political biases among administrators, enforcement of race-neutral admissions policies, foreign funding sources and their uses, research priorities, or protections for free speech on campus.

Instead, the system would monitor students’ post-graduation activities, ostensibly to measure institutional success. This raises troubling questions about how the government would evaluate outcomes. A successful graduate who chooses to become a stay-at-home mother would appear to underperform salary expectations for her degree. Students entering ministry, missionary work, or nonprofit careers would similarly register as failures by purely economic metrics.

The bill provides no definition of what constitutes college success. It simply mandates that the government collect the data for future use.

Data Sharing and Security Vulnerabilities

The legislation authorizes sharing student information across multiple federal agencies. Personal data could be matched with records held by the Social Security Administration, the Internal Revenue Service, the Pentagon, and the Census Bureau.

Data security provisions in the bill call for implementing the latest cybersecurity features currently used across federal agencies. However, government databases have proven repeatedly vulnerable to breaches. Earlier this year, an unidentified threat actor successfully hacked an information-sharing database within the Department of Homeland Security, representing just the latest in a series of federal data compromises.

Such breaches create risks not only from government overreach and bureaucratic mismanagement but also from foreign adversaries gaining access to comprehensive personal information on American students.

Violation of Federal Law

The College Transparency Act would overturn Congress’s explicit prohibition against precisely this type of federal data collection. In 2008, lawmakers amended the Higher Education Act of 1965 to specifically ban the development, implementation, or maintenance of a federal database containing personally identifiable information that tracks individual students over time at institutions governed by the act.

Proponents claim the new database would not violate existing restrictions, but critics maintain the legislation represents exactly what Congress prohibited nearly two decades ago.

With information from Washington Examiner