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Alina Tugend, an award-winning journalist who writes about education, produced for The Chronicle of Higher Education, which guides readers on how to utilize the wealth of data now available to colleges. OTI Senior Policy Analyst Sydney Saubestre informed and was quoted in the report, titled The Data Informed Campus: Using Information to drive change. The following post highlights her contributions:

While federal laws, such as the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA, and some state laws protect student privacy, they are a floor, not a ceiling, says Sydney Saubestre, a senior policy analyst in the Open Technology Institute of the progressive think tank ¹ú²úÊÓƵ.

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Privacy advocates have argued that students should be permitted to opt out of data collection, but the bureaucratic issues that would arise from federal and state requirements on student-data collection — as well as the impact on predictive analytics if too many chose not to participate — would make that very difcult, experts say.

But even though opting out can be complicated, Saubestre thinks students, faculty, and staf members should be allowed to do so when feasible. ‘It’s important that students have agency and understand how their data is being used,’ she says. ‘A lot of institutions — not just [in] higher education — misunderstand how much people want that information and how empowering it is.’

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Even when data is de-identifed, which often occurs when it is transferred to a third party, risks remain. Many people think that if the data is de-identifed, then privacy is protected, but Saubestre says that’s not necessarily true. In some cases, when a user interacts with other data, the de-identifed data can be re-identifed.

‘What we’re seeing is that because it can be linked to external data sets, it can be reconstituted — so you might be able to identify a student whereas you thought that you couldn’t,’ she says

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Institutions also should think about simply collecting less information, Saubestre says. Too often, they believe that collecting more data is always the answer, but colleges often already have the information they need. They just aren’t using it.

‘I believe in data — I’m a researcher,’ Saubestre says. ‘But more data isn’t better — high-quality data is better. If you don’t collect it, you don’t have to protect it.’