With our "Interesting Reads" blog posts, the EDUCAUSE Policy Office highlights recent articles on federal policy issues and developments that are directly relevant to members or provide insights on higher education policy in general.
- A Partial Fix, Inside Higher Ed, March 26,2018. (The omnibus spending bill includes a fix to allow colleges to share Federal Application for Free Student Aid Data (FAFSA) information with scholarship providers.However, colleges remain unable to share this data with non-scholarship providers, like social service programs.)
- A 'Workaround' to U.S. Ban on Student-Level Data, Inside Higher Ed, March 27, 2018. (The University of Texas released a database of graduates' earnings based on Census data – working around the current ban on a federal database of student data.)
- USTelecom Says 'Hell No' to State Net Neutrality Laws, Broadcasting & Cable, March 26, 2018. (In response to state efforts to enact their own net neutrality rules, USTelecom President Jonathan Spalter has said that the association "will aggressively challenge state or municipal attempts to fracture the federal regulatory structure.")
- Apple CEO Tim Cook Calls for Privacy Regulation, The Wall Street Journal, March 28, 2018. (Noting that too many privacy policies are written by lawyers and too difficult for users to grasp, Tim Cook urged technology companies and regulators to examine the ways in which digital profiles of individuals can be abused.)
- Apple's Schoolwork app lets teachers dole out digital assignments to students,The Verge, March 27, 2018. (Apple announced its new tool called Schoolwork, which will allow teachers to assign digital handouts while keeping all student data private.)
- Attorneys General Stress Need for State Data Breach Laws,Health IT Security, March 28, 2018. (Thirty-two state Attorneys General sent a letter to Congress expressing concerns with the Data Acquisition and Technology Accountability and Security Act, arguing that the bill's federal preemption of state data security and breach laws would be detrimental to enforcement and consumer protections.)
- Holding Their Data Close,Inside Higher Ed, March 30, 2018. (A new Springer Nature survey shows researchers in the US, Britain, Canada, and Australia are less likely to share research data from their projects than those in most European countries.)
Kathryn Branson is an associate with Ulman Public Policy.
© 2018 Kathryn Branson. The text of this work is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 International License.