University officials recently added a technological twist to the traditionally paper-based compliance agreement that governs the privacy status of students' academic and financial records.
Since the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974, students have had the right to limit their parents' access to certain personal records, and now they can make those choices online. This simultaneously enables faculty and administrators to check students' privacy settings with the click of a button, so that they can easily decipher with whom they are eligible to share information.
"This may look like a whole new way of doing business to a lot of people, but it's ... simply giving people a way of dealing with the rights that they've had," University Registrar Ronald Sanders said.
He noted that Penn's four undergraduate schools supported the initiative.
"We have had this in our log of work to do for over three years, and we finally got to the point where we had enough resources" to put it into place, he said.
Both Sanders and the University's chief privacy officer, Lauren Steinfeld, said that the new system was not prompted by any recent issues.
"This wasn't in response to any particular incident or problem," Steinfeld said.
Rather, the online program seems to have originated from a general consensus that the paper method created inconveniences.
"There were paper forms for a while, and no one seemed to know where they were," Director of Academic Services Diane Frey said.
Steinfeld acknowledged that many people across campus did not have easy access to the forms.
"This paper process ... was not always a perfect process," she said, identifying the new online feature as "one of the many examples of how technology can help protect personal privacy."
But no matter what medium is used to determine privacy status, the feature is always opt-in. Unless students elect to share information with certain individuals, administrators will assume that their records are confidential.
Sanders said that freshmen are more likely to release information than upperclassmen.
"I think, over time as the students get older, they start to feel a lot more independent," he said. "They make choices for themselves -- particularly after they've had a bad exam."
Steinfeld and Frey both emphasized the fact that the University views students as adults.
"You are adults, and under the law you get to be treated as adults," Sanders said.
This means that when parents pressure administrators to release student information -- even if the student is in severe academic jeopardy -- the administrators will not budge without student permission.
"We've always had a very conservative interpretation of the legislature," Frey said, noting that, in general, some other institutions "have quite a different take on the law."
"They would give out more information," she said.
The only route that Penn parents can take in an attempt to force the University to release information is if the students are listed as dependents on their tax forms.
"The parents do have that route," Frey said.
