Universities are handing over the voting data of private American students to third parties. What do you think of this?

From The College Fix. A relatively new report outlines how universities nationwide have signed over students’ private FERPA data to a third-party vendor that reviews their personal information to help study college students’ voting trends.

View Comments (4)

Get prayer updates from IFA.

The nine-page report describes how a national voting study run out of Tufts’ Institute for Democracy in Higher Education gets university administrators from across the country to agree to release students’ Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA, enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse, where its kept, to a voter data company.

“This is an extraordinary violation of student privacy and is not consistent with FERPA,” said Heather Honey, an investigator with Verity Vote, in a recent interview with The College Fix.

Verity Vote is an organization that works to ensure government transparency, including election integrity issues. …

At issue is Tufts’ institute’s National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement. …

But as recently as February, the U.S. Department of Education encouraged colleges and universities to take part in the study to “use their own campus reports to see where there are gaps among their students in registering, and all schools can use the national dataset to determine target populations.”

The study is “a service to colleges and universities interested in learning their students’ aggregate voter registration and turnout rates in national elections since 2012,” as described on its website.

… More than 1,200 campuses participate in the study.

For a university to participate, its leaders sign a two-page contract that states administrators are allowing the National Student Clearinghouse to release their students’ FERPA data to a “third party vendor,” a company not named in the contract. …

“The third party vendor of choice from inception until recently has been Catalist, the Democrat’s exclusive voter data provider. Tufts maintains a relationship with Catalist but also has an agreement with L2 Political for analysis of the NSC data,” the report states.

The report alleges that campus leaders “may have been duped into authorizing disclosure of highly sensitive private student data to a partisan private corporation that works exclusively with Democrats and progressives under the guise of a dubious ‘study exception’ to FERPA’s prohibitions against sharing of the data.”

Tufts University spokesman Peter Collins told The College Fix via email … the institute switched to L2 in 2018.

The report also argues the release of the data does not fall under FERPA’s exceptions … to “develop, validate, or administer predictive tests”; “administer student aid programs”; or “improve instruction.”

The two-page contract that the universities sign states the data is needed to improve instruction. …

However, the Verity Vote report argues that “[m]easuring the success of voter registration or [Get Out The Vote] activities does not logically fit into any of the study categories … of FERPA.” …

… Collins said the study does improve academic instruction and thus falls under the exception. …

He cited campus campaigns that educate for democracy year-round, “not just during an election season, and using elections as that ‘teachable moment’ for students as responsible citizens in a democracy.” …

Collins told The Fix the university and the institute do not receive students’ personal identification data, that the information is removed by L2. …

“We do not ask for or receive any information, for example, such as phone records. Nothing about a public voter file is partisan. We do not receive any data on party affiliation.”

Does any of this seem right to you? Your thoughts are welcome — share below.

(Excerpted from The College Fix. Photo credit: Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash)