A six-month investigation published last Sunday by the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch found vast differences in the way colleges interpret the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA.) While some colleges are very open and transparent about what they do, others slam the door shut against any kind of release of information.
Invariably, the colleges reason this way: "We can't release educational records," they say. "It's against the law. We could lose our federal funding!" And what is an educational record you might ask?"Well, everything we do deals with education, so EVERYTHING is an educational record."
This "interpretation" of FERPA has led colleges to withhold from parents all kinds of important information that parents deserve to know, everything from suicide attempts to drug overdoses, to repetitive alcohol abuses to not showing up for class for weeks on end. Colleges make every effort to keep the three P's (parents the press and the public) out of the loop so they are free to do whatever they want with no oversight whatsoever.
Congress never intended to prohibit access to this kind of information and in the early 1990s it passed an amendment to FERPA that said, basically this: DISCIPLINARY RECORDS ARE NOT COVERED BY FERPA." What could be clearer than that? But, as the report shows, colleges are still "interpreting" the law as saying that they are.
The report shows that colleges use FERPA to cover up all kinds of crimes, from sexual harassment to bribery to illegal payoffs and violation of NCAA regulations. But perhaps the most interesting parts of the report are the comments by James Buckley, the former senator who authored the law. When he was told how colleges were using it, he said they had it exactly wrong and that it was never intended as a smokescreen to cover up wrongdoing. In fact, he said, Congress should act immediately to prohibit the law's being used in that way.
Colleges pretend to be terrified of violating the law and losing their federal funds, but this is also a part of the facade. In the 35 years since the law was passed in 1974, the federal government has never invoked it. Not once! Nor threatened to invoke it. The entire thing is an abuse to justify college's obsession with secrecy.