By Nicolas Michiels

The U.S. Department of Education (“Department”) recently announced an important change in the way it will enforce the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (“FERPA”). Instead of opening a formal investigation regarding each valid FERPA complaint – a practice that contributed to severe backlogs in the Department’s FERPA case file – the Department will now dedicate investigatory resources to the highest-risk issues and take a less formal, more collaborative approach for other cases.  

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Sharon H. Bob, Ph.D., POWERS Higher Education Specialist on Policy and Regulation, has authored an article on protecting financial aid data from data breaches. Read the article here.

Powers Higher Education Specialist Sharon Bob recently published an article on accreditation and the role accreditors will play in the future.Read More

By: Dan Brozovic

Many in the higher education community are aware of the Department of Education’s (“ED” or the “Department”) latest proposal for the Gainful Employment (“GE”) rule:  to rescind it, replace it with expanded College Scorecard disclosures for all institutions, and possibly also require institutions to make expanded disclosures on their own websites.Read More

By Janell Johnson

On May 25, 2018, the European Union’s (“EU”) General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”) went into effect.  The privacy law is designed to protect the personal data¹ of individuals located in the EU (also known as “data subjects.”)²  It aims to do so through regulation of the processing of data by entities classified, under the law, as “data controllers” and “data processors.” As explained further below, many U.S. institutions of higher education may meet the definition of “data controllers” and those universities’ servicers may meet the definition of “data processors.”Read More

By Katherine Demedis and Ryan Spraker

On May 24, 2018, the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity (NACIQI) welcomed twenty-two members of the public to speak on the topic of for-profit to nonprofit conversions in higher education. Read More