The College Transparency Act Is Another Form Of Big Government Surveillance

Conservative advocacy group Concerned Women for America (CWA) sent a letter to the U.S. Senate on July 28 urging members of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions to vote against SB 2511, or the College Transparency Act (CTA). “The CTA is fundamentally antithetical to Americans’ reasonable expectation that the federal government is not tracking their life choices,” CWA President Penny Nance said in the letter. S.2511, the so-called "College Transparency Act" amounts to nothing less than mass surveillance of college students. Working AGAINST @WhiteHouse efforts to reduce federal involvement in education, the CTA would create a data collection system that stores the personal… pic.twitter.com/Sto4dGJgno— Concerned Women for America LAC (@CWforA) July 29, 2026 The bill, which is pending in the committee, states it aims to create a college student federal database to bring transparency to “federal aid” and “provide accurate … information for students and families making decisions about postsecondary education.” But CWA believes it “tramples on the privacy rights of every American college student” by enabling the federal government to collect private data on college-educated American citizens while attending university and for years after they leave post-secondary education. Current federal law states that the kind of database SB 2511 creates is illegal, the letter says, because it invades personal privacy rights. The letter notes that Sec. 134 of the Higher Education Act of 1965 has specifically prohibited: the development, implementation, or maintenance of a Federal database of personally identifiable information on individuals receiving assistance under this chapter, attending institutions receiving assistance under this chapter, or otherwise involved in any studies or other collections of data under this chapter, including a student unit record system, an education bar code system, or any other system that tracks individual students over time. SB 2511 would repeal this section, even though the bill also states it will “ensure data privacy and security is consistent with any relevant Federal law relating to privacy or data security.” CWA warns that the act will allow the government to “continue to track students after graduation and as they begin their careers, with no opportunity at any point to opt in or out, and with no ability to know what information the database has stored.” The College Transparency Act does not specify the specific information it would collect, stating that, among tracking data on race, age, gender, income, and major, it will track “other data elements that are necessary in accordance with” an earlier clause that allows the gathering of “additional data elements.” Students’ information will also be shared with other federal agencies — including the Social Security Administration, the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of War, and the Census Bureau — according to section 3 of the bill. “Federal databases are ripe for abuse. Not only do they make Americans vulnerable to the abuses of government overreach and a mismanaged bureaucracy, but they can also be used by foreign adversaries,” Nance wrote in the letter, referring to recently declassified information purportedly showing how China accessed 220 million U.S. voter files. A mesh of 14 Republican and 12 Democrat senators are sponsoring the bill that increases government surveillance “at a time when the Trump Administration is, rightfully, seeking to decrease federal involvement in education,” Nance states in the letter. CWA recognizes that higher education needs “colleges to be more transparent in their operations,” but “the CTA wants to make students’ information transparent to colleges, not colleges transparent to the public. Exploiting postsecondary students with a database that will track their personal information for years, even decades, beyond college is the wrong answer,” the letter says.