EDUCAUSE Live! January 11, 2005 1:00 p.m. EST (12:00 p.m. CST, 11:00 a.m. MST, 10:00 a.m. PST); runs one hour

The NCES Proposal on Student Data Collection: Two Viewpoints

Special Guests

Melanie Corrigan
Assistant Director, Center for Policy Analysis
American Council on Education (ACE)

Melanie E. Corrigan is the assistant director of the American Council on Education (ACE) Center for Policy Analysis, which conducts and commissions research on federal and national higher education policy issues of interest to ACE members, policy makers, other higher education associations, and the media. Her areas of expertise include student financing of higher education, federal student aid, and the college presidency. Corrigan is the author of ACE’s The American College President, a survey of college and university leaders conducted since 1986. She has a master’s degree in public affairs from the LBJ School at the University of Texas at Austin and a bachelor’s degree in economics from Smith College.

Barmak Nassirian
Associate Executive Director, External Relations
American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (AACRAO)

Barmak Nassirian has served as associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (AACRAO) since 1998. AACRAO is a nonprofit association of more than 2,300 institutions of higher education and over 9,000 campus enrollment services officials. The association’s policy concerns include enrollment management, academic records and registration, administrative computing, and other operational and planning activities that are central to smooth and efficient administration of colleges and universities. Barmak has been active in higher education policy for more than a decade, focusing on higher education finance, privacy issues, and federal regulations.

Summary

Your host, Steve Worona, will be joined by Melanie Corrigan and Barmak Nassirian, and the topic will be "The NCES Proposal on Student Data Collection: Two Viewpoints."

The National Center for Education Statistics is considering a major change in how student information will be collected. Rather than gathering only aggregate data on enrollments, graduation rates, and similar statistics, the proposal instead would collect the individual student records from which these aggregations are derived. Such a change would allow NCES statistics to account for the growing number of students who attend more than one college, often in multiple systems and multiple states. On the other hand, the proposal raises important privacy, security, and technical concerns. This session features two experts on the NCES proposal, who will discuss the pros and cons from their own differing viewpoints.

Related EDUCAUSE Resources

• IPEDS (Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System)
• Archives of past EDUCAUSE Live! seminars