John Boehner, June 3, 2005

In D.C., too much is never enough. More -- and bigger - is always better. Creeping its way through Washington's corridors of power right now is a proposal that would allow the federal government and the higher-education community to create a massive national database of personal information on American college students.

If Big Brother has a dream, this is it.

Included in this federal database -- known technically as a "unit record" system -- would be each student's name, Social Security number, address, date of birth, attendance record, and financial information. In other words, pretty much everything the federal government and college officials could ever possibly want to know about you.

A database containing students' names and Social Security numbers and other information would, after all, be a marketer's bonanza. While supporters of the proposed database insist the information collected would be permanently off-limits for anything other than strict academic tracking, it's impossible to believe some organizations or agencies wouldn't eventually try to plunder the system for other purposes.

Some supporters of the proposed database portray it as a necessary evil -- a step that has to be taken if American consumers are to have useful and accurate information about things like college graduation rates. A few, outrageously, are even depicting the proposed database as a response to Republican calls for greater transparency in college financing. They have it perfectly backwards.

Let’s be clear: the problem isn't that government and colleges lack detailed information about students. The problem is that students -- and parents and taxpayers, for that matter -- lack detailed information about the colleges they're forking out billions of dollars annually to support.

When choosing between College A, with an annual tuition of $15,000, and College B, with an annual tuition of $25,000, parents and students have a difficult time figuring out whether the $10,000 gap is due to legitimate differences in academic quality, or to the existence of frivolous perks.

It's absurd to suggest that the reason consumers lack this information stems from the federal government's reluctance to keep detailed files on every college student and graduate in America. The real culprit is the education establishment's ongoing reluctance to give the public a clear and accurate glimpse at how colleges spend their money. What's missing, by and large, is "sunshine."

To fix this, Rep. Howard P. (Buck) McKeon, a Republican of California, and I have offered legislation, HR 609, that would give students and parents better access to information about colleges -- information that is already being collected about colleges and what they offer for the money. And instead of proposing that students surrender their privacy to the federal government, HR 609 ensures that anything about the personal identities of individual students will not be included.

"We do not believe that the price for enrolling in college should be permanent entry into a federal registry, and we fear that the existence of such a registry will lead to future demands for access to the data for noneducational purposes," says a policy statement issued by the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities. "Proponents of the plan have failed to make a case that justifies this erosion of student privacy." I couldn’t agree more.

There's a clear need for American colleges and universities to be more transparent to parents, students, and taxpayers, but the solution doesn't lie in the creation of a federal database of student information. The solution lies in arming students and parents with data about colleges that is already being collected, so they can make fully informed decisions with their college savings and exercise their true power as consumers in the higher-education marketplace.

Congressman John Boehner, a Republican, represents Ohio's Eighth Congressional District, which includes Miami, Butler, Preble, Darke, and Mercer Counties.