Pros And Cons Of The Ferpa Act

“FERPA [Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act] essentially means you have no right, as a parent, to know what or how your children are doing in school.” Michele Willens says this in her article, “College Students Have Too Much Privacy” about the FERPA act that was passed in 1974. It was originally put in place to protect the privacy of students, but it also keeps information private from the student’s parents, or current gauardians. Because so many parents waste money on college students that might miss classes or even drop out without them knowing, the FERPA act needs to be reformed.

If the FERPA act is not reformed soon, students all over the United States will continue to miss classes or just completely withdraw from school without their parent’s knowledge. This is brought out very well by a story shared in the article, which tells about a girl’s parents who were under the impression that their daughter had graduated from the college that she had supposedly been attending. When their daughter’s former roommate called them and told them that she hadn’t been at school for over two years, they were furious. By law they had no right to know whether or not their daughter had graduated from school. The

article also states that “roughly forty-five percent of students who enter college will not even graduate at all.” If students are protected by law from their own parents, that number will easily climb to sixty or maybe seventy percent.
In addition to students not graduating, if FERPA is not reformed, millions of parents, who pay their students tuition, will be losing thousands of dollars because they didn’t have the right to know if their child was even attending school.

An excerpt from the act, states “universities consider students as adults, regardless of age or financial dependence”. The article goes on to say, “there is a special kind of pain associated with discovering that your kid took a gap year while still enrolled, if it so happens that you are coughing up sixty thousand dollars per year”. Just this minor little flaw in the act makes millions of parent’s waste money that could have been put toward other useful things. This could easily be changed with a reform of the FERPA

act.
To reform the FERPA act, there should be very strict guidelines as to who gets to see the student’s information, but not so strict that the students own parents cannot see what they are doing. If the person is not currently living with the student or are not the current guardian of the student, then they should not be allowed to see their information. In addition, if a student is financially dependent on someone other than themselves to pay their tuition, then that person should have full rights to see anything they do in school. This is such an easy solution to the hole that was left in the FERPA act.
The FERPA act was put in place to protect student’s privacy, It not only keeps it private from strangers but from their own parents. It is very important that parents know how their student is doing in school, whether they are missing class, getting bad grades, or just plain aren’t attending the school that their parents are paying for. The need for a reform of the FERPA act is very apparent. Parents all over the United States will be able to save thousands of dollars and countless hours if this happens.