CAL STATE, UC DEFYING STATE LAW PERSONAL INFORMATION ON STUDENTS UNDER WRAPS.

Byline: Lisa M. Sodders Staff Writer

In defiance of state law, Cal State and UC officials are refusing to provide personal information on students that could help determine which university programs are working - and which are not.

The California Postsecondary Education Commission has been seeking the data since 1999, when the Legislature passed a law ordering its release. State officials want to determine whether their $12 billion-a-year investment in higher education is being spent effectively by tracking students' enrollment through the community college and public university systems.

While the community colleges have been providing the information without any complications or security breach for five years, officials with the University of California and California State University systems have balked, saying they don't want to compromise students' privacy.

``For the two segments to fail to deliver the data is not only arrogant, but nothing less than obstruction and failure to follow the law,'' CPEC's board chairman Howard Welinsky said Friday. ``I call upon them to release the data and let CPEC do its job.''

The U.S. Department of Education has ruled that releasing the data would not violate students' privacy, but university officials say it's not that simple.

Each is willing to work with CPEC, but wants more guarantees that the data will remain secure, particularly in the wake of computer hacking incidents at several UC and CSU campuses last year.

``We want to be involved in a consultative role,'' said Ravi Poorsina, a spokeswoman for the UC system. ``It should be a cooperative effort, not just handing over the data and not knowing what happens to it. We really want a clear objective in writing as to how it will be used and disposed of.''

But Welinsky maintains the university systems don't want their programs scrutinized by outsiders.

``Involved means control,'' he said. ``Nobody wants to be held accountable by some other body.

``It shouldn't have taken five years for us to get to this point. Privacy should not be used as an excuse for the failure to be held accountable to the public.''

Jason Murphy, legislative aide to Sen. Jack Scott, chairman of the Senate Education Committee, said the issue could come up in budget hearings for the two systems. Scott also serves on the budget subcommittee that oversees the UC and CSU budgets.

CPEC already receives more than a dozen data elements, including on the age, race, gender, ethnicity of students, whether they're enrolled part time or full time, and how many course units they take. But what it wants is a unique identification number - encrypted from the student's Social Security number - that would allow the panel to track individual students over time.

``We only get a snapshot,'' complained Murray J. Haberman, CPEC's executive director. ``We can't evaluate and make recommendations to the Legislature for fixing the inefficiencies in the systems that might exist unless we have the data.''

Data culled from the community colleges has already proven useful, Haberman said. For example, an analysis of nursing programs at community colleges found that some programs had dropout rates of more than 70 percent. CPEC also determined that many of those students were unprepared for the courses and were not proficient in English.

California isn't the only state interested in this kind of data, Haberman said. Several other states have programs using this kind of data, and the National Center for Education Statistics is requesting that Congress allow them to collect this data for institutions nationwide.

Lisa M. Sodders, [phone]

lisa.sodders(at)dailynews.com