Editorial | What's the point?

The highly publicized report from the Commission on the Future of Higher Education made many excellent suggestions, but one in particular has left some scratching their heads: the creation of a database to track student data.

In its report, the commission claims the database is essential for consumers and policymakers to "make informed choices about how well colleges and universities are serving their students." The database would likely keep a record of students' grades, race, transfer records and other data.

On the surface, it seems like a good idea. Officials promise anonymity to students in the records by tracking data not by name but by scrambled identification numbers. And great strides in K-12 education have been made by utilizing data drawn from standardized-test scores.

Surely, there could be some use to the information collected by the database. What troubles us, however, is that officials - namely Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings - have not made the benefits of such a system clear.

Unlike in K-12 education, college students don't take standardized tests - except those who plan to continue on to graduate school. So, without standardized tests, how useful can the data be? Will anyone learn anything by finding out what grade students at different schools earned in their introductory economics courses?

In justifying the database, Spellings told The Chronicle of Higher Education, "Just like in every other area of American life, we have come to expect information when we buy something - particularly something that's expensive, that's so important for your life. We ought to know more."

More information can be helpful when informing policy, but when it comes at the cost of student privacy, it might not be a good decision. So until Spellings makes the benefits clear, it hardly seems justified to create the database.

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