The “permanent record” that schoolteachers warned would follow you through life can now track you onto the information highway.
While this news is not likely to cause rambunctious second- graders to behave, it is significant for the colleges that process millions of student records each year and churn out transcripts for their graduates. Many see this development -- the electronic transfer of information -- as a way to improve efficiency by reducing the hours and the money spent on receiving and sending records.
The new method takes advantage of the Internet or more-secure commercial networks, along with a common format for organizing and transmitting records.
Once it catches on, advocates say, it could revolutionize educational record keeping and the college-application process, while offering institutions a quicker, less costly, and more accurate means of exchanging data.
“This is one way to reduce costs by simplifying the process,” says Lysbeth Bainbridge, a staff member of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, which promotes electronic exchanges.
Campus officials say the new methods also can help improve academic advising by allowing professors and counselors to view a student’s transcript on line within hours of its being sent from a high school or another college.
Already, more than 500 colleges and schools are testing or using the technology -- known as electronic data interchange, or E.D.I. -- to send transcripts and other educational records.
At the same time, educational organizations and software companies are urging schools and colleges to adopt a new standardized format, called SPEEDE/ExPRESS for making these electronic exchanges. Some companies are even offering universities and state education departments a group discount on software including the SPEEDE/ExPRESS format, to encourage schools and colleges to adopt it as their common language.
The use of such electronic-exchange methods is still largely experimental. The expense of software and personnel to computerize records is a barrier to some institutions, particularly public-school districts.
The cost of the software alone starts at about $2,000 for a program that runs on a personal computer. It can reach $30,000 for an institution using a mainframe computer. Costs for maintenance agreements, which insure that upgrades in the format are integrated into the software, can run from $800 to $5,300 a year.
Institutions in some states, such as Florida, have developed their own systems for exchanging records electronically and use the SPEEDE/ExPRESS standard format only to trade records with out-of-state institutions that also happen to use it.
Most of the colleges that use it -- including public universities in Oregon, Texas, and Maryland -- are large institutions that have set up exchanges with selected schools from which they receive large numbers of students.
Nonetheless, advocates of SPEEDE/ExPRESS predict that it will be widely used within a few years simply because it can save schools and colleges time and money.
Another boost for the format could come within two years, when the organizations that process thousands of law-school and medical-school applications start using it.
According to estimates, colleges must spend from $1 to $12 to produce and send a paper transcript. Electronic methods enable such records to be transmitted from one computer system to another without the need to print and mail them at one end, and key them in again at the other.
“You would not believe the amount of time we used to spend photocopying documents and sending them through campus mail to advisers,” says Mary M. Neary, associate registrar at Arizona State University.
Arizona State has exchanged transcripts electronically since 1987, mostly with the Maricopa County Community Colleges, which send many transfer students to the university. Advisers at Arizona State often need the Maricopa records to help students decide what courses to take. The exchanges with Maricopa are done with software designed specifically for the purpose.
The university is beginning to use SPEEDE/ExPRESS, so it can eventually swap transcripts with thousands of other schools and colleges.
It is now testing SPEEDE/ExPRESS with a local school district. Arizona State gave the district a brand of software that contains the standard format, and the district agreed to provide its own computer and labor to install the system. The university will provide the $1,900 software package to other Arizona schools or districts that send it many students.
“We see it as a cost benefit,” says Ms. Neary. “It’s advantageous to us. It helps the students, and it helps our processing internally.”
Few educational institutions have exchanged enough data electronically to measure how much time and money the process can save. But Ms. Neary says that during the past few years of university budget cutting, her office was able to absorb the loss of four employees through attrition without much impact, because so much of the work was being handled electronically.
Ms. Neary is one of several education officials who have worked since 1989 to develop electronic standards for routine higher-education transactions, such as sending transcripts and verifying enrollment.
The association of registrars and admissions officers is backing the effort to develop standards. It calls the project SPEEDE, for Standardization of Postsecondary Education Electronic Data Exchange. It has merged with a similar project for elementary and secondary schools, under the auspices of the Council of Chief State School Officers, called ExPRESS, an acronym for Exchange of Permanent Records Electronically for Students and Schools.
The groups collectively have received $775,000 since 1989 from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics to promote SPEEDE/ExPRESS.
The term SPEEDE/ExPRESS refers both to their joint committee and to the various electronic standards being developed for educational use. A standard can be thought of as a common way of arranging educational data on electronic forms so that they can be exchanged by computers that may be using different brands of administrative software.
To date, the national body that oversees electronic data- interchange standards has approved SPEEDE/ExPRESS formats for requesting a transcript and acknowledging its receipt, and for the transcripts themselves. The committee expects approval for standards for college-admissions applications in June, and is developing standards for financial-aid applications.
On campuses where SPEEDE/ExPRESS is already being used, officials say they are pleased.
“It’s been wonderful,” says Gloria G. Andrus, the registrar at Ricks College, a two-year institution that sends many of its graduates on to Brigham Young University. The college typically dispatches about 3,000 transcripts a year to Brigham Young, and with SPEEDE/ExPRESS, she says, “transcripts never get lost or misplaced.”
Ms. Andrus says the system has also allowed her to operate without adding staff members, despite a growth in enrollment. For transcripts that the college sends electronically, it waives the $2 fee.
The Law School Admissions Council, which processes about 180,000 transcripts a year from colleges across the country, also expects SPEEDE/ExPRESS to save it some money, though it is not sure how much. The council hires about 25 temporary workers from September through March, at a cost of $158,000, to process transcripts by hand.
The Association of American Medical Colleges, which is testing SPEEDE/ExPRESS with four institutions, says it expects about half of the 110,000 transcripts it processes to be sent electronically within three years.
While the new users are likely to give the standard format a boost, even supporters of electronic-exchange methods note that it could be years before such practices become commonplace.
“It’s like a telephone: It’s only useful once others have one, too,” says Dennis Carey, director of information-resource management for the Oregon State System of Higher Education.
In Oregon, five four-year colleges, four community colleges, and three school districts are using SPEEDE/ExPRESS. That’s not enough to make the system cost-effective. But most of the other school districts cannot afford to buy the software, even at the group rate of about $2,000.
Barbara Clements, who directs data and information-systems projects at the school officers’ council, acknowledges that schools have not moved quickly to exchange data electronically. She expects that they will eventually rely heavily on the SPEEDE/ExPRESS format, because they exchange so many transcripts. Usage will increase, she predicts, once more software companies include the standard in their packages for managing student records.
Companies that already include SPEEDE/ExPRESS in their products say they aren’t discouraged about its slow growth. The technology for electronic-funds transfer, for example, was around for five or six years before it caught on, says Bill Mahoney, vice-president for client services at SCT Corporation, which has sold software to more than 960 schools and colleges.
The sheer volume of transcripts makes electronic transfer inevitable, he says. Sixty per cent of the nation’s 14 million college students request that at least one copy of their transcript be sent to another college, a graduate school, or a scholarship fund each year, he says. “That’s a lot of pieces of paper.”
Since 1991, SCT has donated a portion of its customers’ software-maintenance fees to the registrars’ association to help it promote SPEEDE/ExPRESS. Several of the association’s 23 corporate members also are software companies that benefit from promoting the standard format.
Ms. Neary, who chairs the SPEEDE committee this year, says she sees nothing wrong with companies’ helping to promote SPEEDE/ExPRESS, if this helps to make the technology more widely available. It’s a proven business technique, she says. “Why shouldn’t education take advantage of the same thing?”
