When I was a child, I spake as a child,
I understood as a child,
I thought as a child:
but when I became a man, I put aside childish things.--1 Corinthians 13.11
In a recent op-ed in the Los Angeles Times that appeared here in Perspective on Sept. 13, freelance writer Michele Willens argues that college students have too much privacy.
Without even an aside to the Fourth Amendment, she goes straight at FERPA, the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act, which establishes restrictions on the release of college students' academic information without the consent of the student. Not even parents of students can access their academic progress without students' consent. Willens argues that college students are not responsible enough to manage their own progress, so they need parents with access to their records to manage their progress for them, whether the students want them to have that access or not.
Much of Willens' argument hangs on the notion that college students are not mature enough to manage their own academic progress. She cites statistics from the National Student Clearinghouse (which does not oppose FERPA, by the way) showing that roughly 45 percent of students who start college fail to graduate. However, her argument fails to prove that the wholesale stripping of legal adults' privacy concerning academic records will result in any improvement whatsoever. She can only speculate that there would be better graduation rates if parents were free to access their adult children's records at will.
Parental access to children's high school records has not eradicated failures to graduate from high school, nor has that access prevented high rates of students requiring remediation in college if parental access to academic records is such a cure-all for lagging academic performance. Even if Willens' assumption does result in improvement for some students, what of those who would see no improvement? What benefit would be traded for their lost rights to privacy? Besides, there actually are ways, which she acknowledges but labels as "laborious," for parents to gain access to their children's college records.
One way is for the student willingly to sign a waiver, which takes all of a minute in the registrar's office. There are also ways for parents to prove the dependency of the child to gain access. Those processes might perhaps be deemed laborious, but rightly so, as they seek to circumvent privacy protections of persons considered legal guardians of themselves and their own education affairs.
While it is true that FERPA restricts access to records of all college students, even those under 18, the vast majority of college students are 18 or over. People of this age can vote, enlist (or be drafted) in the military, buy cigarettes, and obtain a commercial pilot's license, but we are expected to believe they lack the ability to go to school? Even if this is true, should the government strip the rights of those who are capable just to coddle those who are not? These are legal adults, with legal rights.
Perhaps Willens is approaching woefully low graduation rates from the wrong angle. There are several nationwide initiatives that are working to streamline student progress: PACE (Path to Accelerated Completion and Employment), CCA (Complete College America), and Guided Pathways, just to name a few. These initiatives seek to make it easier for students to manage their academic careers by streamlining processes, delineating course sequences, and creating clearer pathways from admission to graduation, not by turning that management over to parents over the objections of the students.
Here is perhaps the crux of the problem with Willens' proposed weakening of student privacy rights. She correctly identifies that student immaturity and inexperience is a large part of the problem but incorrectly suggests that the correct approach is to brush the students aside and do what has prevented them from gaining maturity their whole lives: treat them like babies incapable of taking care of themselves.
What Willens seems to have overlooked is that parents who are providing financial support for college already have leverage to obtain the information they seek. It would be perfectly reasonable for anyone providing financial support for a student's college costs to require as a condition of that support some evidence that the student is making progress. The federal government, through Title IV, expects just that. Students who do not maintain satisfactory academic progress lose eligibility for financial aid, and reporting that academic progress is a condition of receiving and continuing the financial aid in the first place.
A parent providing support could say to the student that, in order to get the support, the student would have to sign a release. The student could refuse, but then the student would also be refusing the offered support. If this approach seems coercive, how is it more coercive than removing the student's right to object to the parents' access to the information? It also teaches these students an apparently needed lesson in being an adult: Don't expect something for nothing.
As for parents providing no support, why should the government override the wishes of a legal adult to protect access to records when that parent has given the student no reason to grant access? In such cases, I would suggest the parents take this approach: Ask nicely, and hope that someone raised the student well enough that he or she would be open to such a clearly reasonable request.
Dennis J. Humphrey is division chair and professor of English at Arkansas State University-Beebe.
Editorial on 09/27/2015