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.
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, she said, and published its findings on the student voting issue in July 2023.
At issue is Tufts’ institute’s National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement, launched during the Obama administration in response to a “call to action,” the report states.