How does FERPA help students?

The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (FERPA) gives students rights by keeping their educational records confidential. We received an email on Aug. 16 detailing our rights under FERPA. I didn’t read the whole thing either, but I thought a summary of FERPA would be a good reminder of what rights are ours.

The student rights enumerated under FERPA include seeing our information that’s within the university’s records, contesting those records if we think them faulty and the need for our consent to disclose those records. However, there are two exceptions to this right of disclosure.

One is the recipient of the information. According to the U.S. Department of Education’s website, this last right excludes certain conditions, such as in the case of “[s]chool officials with legitimate educational interest,” “[o]ther schools to which a student is transferring,” and others which can be found on the page titled “Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).” FERPA also precludes professors from posting grades with identifiable information such as students’ names or E numbers.

The second exception is the nature of the information. There is information that may be disclosed without student consent, including “directory” information such as name, phone number, address of residence, and date and place of birth. The U.S. Department of Education reassures us that “schools must tell parents and eligible students about directory information and allow parents and eligible students a reasonable amount of time to request that the school not disclose directory information about them.” Besides, many of us are already aware that some our contact information can be accessed by typing our names into the Faculty/Staff/Student Directory on ETSU’s website.

As much good as FERPA causes, not every effect of it has been positive. Schools have gone too far to avoid breaking that law. They have gone too far to the other side – overcorrecting, if you will. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, “the penalty for non-compliance with [FERPA] … can be withdrawal of U.S. Department of Education funds from the institution or agency that has violated the law.” Such a daunting sanction behooves institutions of higher learning to intentionally stay within the law’s limits.

Jill Ripenhoff and Todd Jones of the “Columbus Dispatch” recount instances of universities refusing to publish (or greatly redacting) information like recipients of free football tickets, team flight passenger lists, and “minutes and recordings of public committee meetings,” according to Kevin Lessmiller in “Post, UWM, reach settlement in records lawsuit.” If journalists cannot access information such as this, it hinders free exchange of information that does not hurt anyone, as well as communication with the public about matters they care about.

To conclude then, we should know what we are legally entitled to and take advantage of it, knowing the benefits of FERPA as well as its limitations and potential backfires.