College Transparency Act

This bill creates a secure, privacy-protected national system to track college students’ enrollment, completion, costs, financial aid, and outcomes like jobs and earnings. The Education Department’s statistics agency must build it within four years to give students and families clear, customizable information when comparing programs and schools, while also easing duplicate reporting for colleges . Public reports will be aggregate only (no names), available through a user-friendly website that lets people compare schools and programs on access, progress, graduation, costs, debt, and post-college results; the data cannot be sold and cannot be used to rank colleges by the federal government . Colleges that get federal aid must submit required data; others may join voluntarily; the change is timed to reduce current IPEDS reporting burdens .

The system has strong privacy limits. It bars use of personally identifiable information for any law enforcement purpose or to limit services to students, sets penalties for unlawful disclosure, requires audits and breach protocols, and follows federal security standards. It also blocks collection of sensitive items like health data, discipline records, exact addresses, citizenship or migrant status, political or religious views, grades, and test scores. Students can see the personal data about themselves and ask for corrections. Data matching with agencies like IRS, Census, Social Security, Veterans Affairs, Defense, Labor Statistics, and Federal Student Aid is allowed only to produce secure aggregate outcomes and cannot create one giant linked federal database; matches happen periodically, not continuously . It also removes a prior legal ban on creating such a student-level data system to make this possible .

• Who is affected: students and families seeking clear college info; colleges and state systems that report data; researchers using carefully vetted, de-identified data .
• What changes: a national student-level data system with public, aggregate dashboards; annual feedback reports to schools and states; reduced duplicate reporting; strict privacy/security rules and penalties; no law-enforcement use; no federal college rankings; no sale of data; bans on collecting sensitive data .
• When: advisory work starts within two years; the system and public reporting must be in place within four years; college reporting requirements take effect at that four-year mark .