A bipartisan group of lawmakers reopened the fight over a federal “unit record” system on Thursday, introducing legislation in both chambers of Congress that would link individual student records to wage data in an effort to “empower” prospective college students.
Supporters say that the bill, which would require the secretary of education to report college graduates’ earnings by program of study and state of employment, would help families make smarter decisions about college.
On Thursday, Sen. Ron Wyden, the bill’s chief sponsor, said earnings information would “bring value into the equation.”
“Right now, it’s easier to get the pros and cons of buying a used car than it is to get the nuts and bolts of higher education,” Senator Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, said at a news conference that featured students and guidance counselors. “There’s a boatload of information out there, but it’s strewn all over the countryside. We want to put it all in one place.”
In addition to earnings data, the bill, dubbed the Student Right to Know Before You Go Act of 2013, would require the secretary to provide consumers with information about cumulative debt, transfer rates, and graduation rates for part-time students. Outcomes for veterans and student-aid recipients would be reported separately.
But the measure faces a major hurdle: a five-year-old prohibition on the creation of a federal unit-record database. The ban, which blocked then-Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings from creating such a system, grew out of privacy concerns raised by private colleges and conservatives. They worried that information in the database could be used for noneducation purposes, and that leaks in the system could expose confidential information.
Since then, the federal government has spent millions of dollars helping states develop their own databases, and opposition to a federal system has softened.
The bill got a boost in February, when the House majority leader, Eric Cantor, Republican of Virginia, endorsed it in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute, saying it would help families and students “make better decisions about where to go to school, and how to budget their dollars.”
Yet many Republicans remain wary of a national database, including Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, the top Republican on the Senate education committee, and Rep. Virginia Foxx, the North Carolina Republican who sponsored the 2008 ban and who now leads the U.S. House of Representatives’ subcommittee on higher education.
Next week Rep. Luke A. Messer, a first-term Indiana Republican who sits on the education committee, will introduce a bill that would require a Congressional advisory committee to “explore the feasibility of reporting post-graduation earnings” and “consider the effect such information will have on student privacy,” according to a draft summary of the measure.
Andrew P. Kelly, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, said the issue had created “a schism between two sets of Republicans,” much as the debate over charter schools has divided Democrats. Though he supports the bill, in principle, he said it would be dangerous for backers to discount the “privacy hawks.”
“Privacy advocates have a powerful voice, and their message does resonate,” he said.
‘A Heavy Lift’
Theoretically, Representative Cantor could bypass Ms. Foxx’s panel and bring the bill directly to the House floor for a vote. But majority leaders rarely run the risk of splitting their party, and Mr. Cantor would have a hard time getting all House Republicans on board, Mr. Kelly said.
Cheryl Oldham, vice president of the Institute for a Competitive Workforce at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, agreed that abolishing the ban would be “a heavy lift.” But Ms. Oldham, who has hosted several strategy sessions with supporters of the measure, said Congress could still require colleges to disaggregate outcomes data into smaller demographic categories, as the bill introduced on Thursday would. The holy grail—earnings data—would require some additional thinking, she said.
This is the second time Senator Wyden and Sen. Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, have introduced the bill. The first time, in 2012, they proposed stringing together state databases.
They shifted to a federal database after college lobbyists argued that a state-based system would be “unworkable,” said Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president of the American Council on Education. “You can’t decide to link 50 different state databases after you’ve created them,” he said.
Even with the shift, higher-education lobbyists aren’t exactly embracing the bill. Mr. Hartle would only call it a “thoughtful” bill and a “good framework for discussion.”
Sarah A. Flanagan, vice president for government relations at the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, said she worried that earnings information reported to prospective students would overlook many other factors that contribute to graduates’ salaries, such as their career, their geographic region, and whether they earned a higher degree.
“This is information that consumers want,” she said, “but we have to make sure we have the causation right.”
Supporters of the bill accuse colleges of trying to hide negative outcomes from prospective students. At Thursday’s news conference, Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, one of the bill’s sponsors, said “pushback” against the bill has come from colleges “that don’t want to share this information.”
Rep. Rob Andrews, a New Jersey Democrat who has co-sponsored a companion bill in the House, agreed, saying, “Institutions that aren’t making the grade don’t want to tell their story.”
Senator Rubio reassured students, parents, and guidance counselors at the event that their personal information would be protected under the bill. “There’s not going to be any information about you out there,” he said, only aggregate data.
Students at the event welcomed the bill, saying it would help them decide where to attend college and how much to borrow. Guidance counselors said it would help their students.
“It sounds like a great benefit,” said Ana Blanco, a junior at TC Williams High School, in Alexandria, Va., who is the first in her family to attend college. “Because I’m basically doing the research on my own.”
