WASHINGTON — As education and workforce subcommittee members and policy experts attending a hearing Wednesday on Capitol Hill examined ways to help students and families make higher education decisions, they were reminded that student privacy should always be priority.
“The need to provide students and policymakers with more information — no matter how valuable that information may be — should never come at the expense of student privacy,” said Rep. Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.). “Quite frankly, we don’t really know what’s working and what’s not.
“As policymakers, we need to be better equipped to conduct proper oversight of how taxpayer dollars are being spent.”
The hearing, titled “Empowering Students and Families to Make Informed Decisions on Higher Education,” was a discussion of ways to improve the Higher Education Act, increase transparency and ensure federal student aid programs are sufficient.
Experts invited to testify as witnesses included Dr. Mark Schneider, vice president at the American Institutes for Research; Jason Delisle, vice president at the American Enterprise Institute; Andrew K. Benton, president and chief executive officer at Pepperdine University; and Mamie Voight, vice president of policy research at the Institute for Higher Education Policy (IHEP).
The testimonies given by the key witnesses focused on changing the Integrated Postsecondary Data Source (IPEDS) to collect information on all types of students’ success and decision making, as well as what students’ information an institution requires and chooses to make public. Currently, IPEDS’ data only covers first-time, full-time students. Everyone in the room agreed that it needs to be changed to study all types of students, in order to benefit the institution and future college students looking where to go for higher education.
“Institutions have to report to multiple different entities … and that is highly burdensome on them. An improved system that would streamline that collection would help to alleviate the burden on those institutions, so instead of focusing that data on reporting the data on compliance purposes, they could instead use that data and focus on educating (future and current) students,” Voight said.
