A Poor Proposal

As the St. John's College web site currently lists on it's homepage, SJC President Nelson spoke at a Cato Institute forum regarding The Spellings Commission Report on the Future of Higher Education(PDF), conducted by the Department of Education in conjunction with Boeing, IBM, and Microsoft in September.

He had this to say

The commission's call for a student unit record database serves none of the purposes I've described. It serves only the interests of the data collection, management and research industry. No one has made a credible argument that knowing the schools attended, classes taken, grades completed, and who knows what else, for each and every person in the United States will lead to improvement in the classroom. The connection is simply too remote. Why then, without a substantial hope of improving learning by collecting all this data, would we want to invest so many millions in such an enormous undertaking, and risk the privacy of our citizenry and the security of such sensitive data? As good as federal agencies are at protecting information, we've seen report after report in recent months of sometimes inadvertent, sometimes intentional, and sometimes illegal release or theft of sensitive data on thousands and thousands of citizens. We need a more compelling argument than we've seen to justify such a project. If the point of collecting the data is to satisfy lawmakers that the investment of taxpayer dollars in financial aid programs is worth the expense, there is more than enough data already out there to answer this question. And if even that data were somehow found wanting, statistical sampling would provide the answer without the need to create a cradle-to-grave catalog of each of our educational records.

Secretary Spellings has called for a privacy-protected student-level data system similar to what currently exists for K-12 students that would create a higher education information system.

In the past I've flirted with the rumor and loose allegations put forward that the venture capital required to start Facebook came from the failed DARPA Total Information Awareness Initiative. Now I feel that the aforementioned, publicly unpopular, and thus scrapped project may have just splintered for reassembly later. Who needs to pour black ops money into buying back facebook data when you can just set the system up under shroud of a Program to benefit "College Consumers." I'm equally leery of the presence of corporate representatives in an Education Department Commission. From reading over the final report I got the feeling that this database was to be looked at by college reps as offering potential revenue through sale and release of data to corprate entities.

All the same it looks like more privacy out the door...

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A podcast of the forum from the Cato site