The Daily Background

I just heard back from my college’s registrar today about the whole giving-my-personal-information to the Marines without telling me situation, and I’ve got a lot more information about this.

My school is a recipient of some federal funding, which allows the government to cut off said funding should the school fail to comply with recruiting requests of what’s called “directory information” under a package of legislation referred to as the Solomon Amendment. I did some digging, and here’s what I found.

Under the legislation (passed by Republican-controlled Congress in 1996), colleges are not only allowed to give personal information to military recruiters- they’re even allowed to sell it to military recruiters.

And not only are they allowed to give it away without the advance express permission of students, the government mandates that they keep it pretty much a secret- there are provisions within the legislation which prevent the school from prominently telling students how they can opt out of the directory information that the military gets. It is literally illegal for a college to actually announce that they’re giving (or worse, selling) personal information to military recruiters without student’s permission.

If they find out about it, like I did, students can opt out once a semester. Under federal regulations called the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), schools are required to “tell parents and eligible students about directory information and allow parents and eligible students a reasonable amount of time to request that the school not disclose directory information about them” on an annual basis. In the case of my college, that means vague wording about opting out in on page 56 of my student handbook, without any mention of how long you have to opt out.

And here’s the worst part about it: it would be against the law for a teacher, for example, to even tell students about any of this. It has to be kept a secret for students to figure out on their own, if they read their whole student handbooks or whatever (and really, who does?).

But here’s another thing. Students can’t specifically opt out of this recruiting information directory. Students cannot, under law, ask their schools not to give their personal information to the military specifically. Instead, a student has to ask their information be removed from the school’s directory which is also used for stuff like future employer’s information, so on, and so forth. It’s in this way that the legislation effectively prevents students from stopping the military from getting their information- it’s a really underhanded trick.

With this however, comes a little loophole. If schools can prove that they treat the military just like any other prospective employer looking to interest students in working for them, then they can treat them pretty much however they want. This might mean refusing to disclose any information, or it might mean only giving partial information to the military. So now I’m going to ask my school’s registrar if the school gives the military any special treatment, or if they would give any prospective employer the same information (such as the high school I went to, my major, my age, my phone number, and so forth) if they just called up and asked for it.

Incidentally, the Constitutionality of the Solomon Amendment was challenged in a case a few years ago that went all the way up to the Supreme Court. Lawyers for students and schools argued that since the military discriminates against gays and lesbians, schools should not have to give them students personal information (they lost the case).

Filed under: Z-TDB Blog