The purpose of the Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education is to analyze higher education in four areas: access, affordability, quality and accountability. Change “accountability” to “trackability” and we might have a more accurate reflection of one of the main sources of controversy surrounding this document.

One proposal to increase accountability for higher education and to measure and compare the outcomes of various institutions is the creation of a national database to enter student information, including financial aid status, enrollment information and student progress. Since the Commission has a long term plan to include future labor force outcomes in its accountability assessment, this system will potentially be tracking citizens for life.

This is a part of the increased accountability desired for higher education, and the information (in aggregate form) would be made available to policymakers and prospective students. In a letter to Charles Miler, the chairman of the commission, the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities outlines its concerns.

While saluting the Commission’s recommendations in these areas [access and accountability], we find others extremely problematic. The first of these has to do with student unit record data. NAICU and its member institutions share a fundamental belief that student and family privacy must be protected. For 30 years, federal privacy laws have allowed schools to release student-specific confidential data only with the written approval of the student. We strongly support those laws. We object to the idea of student-level data on the basis of four key concerns: privacy, security, the law, and existing data. — NAICU (PDF)

The current draft to be put into report form for Secretary Spellings and the August 3 draft to which this letter refers contain only vague language regarding this database, stating that “non-identifiable data” be collected and be made available to prospective students and policy makers. The NAICU points out, however, that this “seems inconsistent with [the Commission's] desire to collect data on transfer students, and to track labor force outcomes.”

Incidentally, this desire to track students from school to work goes back to legislation of that same name in 1994 which states in Section 104:

The connecting activities component of a School to Work Opportunities Program shall include . . .

(7) collecting and analyzing information regarding post-program outcomes of participants in the School-to-Work Opportunities program, to the extent practicable, on the basis of socioeconomic status, race, gender, ethnicity, culture, and disability, and on the basis of whether the participants are students with limited-English proficiency, school dropouts, disadvantaged students, or academically talented students; and

(8) linking youth development activities under this Act with employer and industry strategies for upgrading the skills of their workers.

Perhaps nFocus, the creators of KidTrax, will be of service in the implementation of this plan. Then we can have a streamlined system of collecting student information from the time a child enters daycare until they enter the workforce and beyond. How else can we hold universities accountable?