From the Harvard Crimson: The Trump administration’s Friday lawsuit seeking Harvard’s admissions records may run up against the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, a federal law that restricts the disclosure of student records that could identify individual applicants, according to legal experts. Scholars said the Department of Justice’s demand for applicant-level admissions data — including grades, standardized test scores, race, and internal evaluations — risks violating FERPA because those data points, when combined, could make individual students identifiable, even if names are removed.
...Vinay Harpalani, a professor of law at the University of New Mexico, said he would “be surprised” if the administration were to succeed, citing the confidentiality issues inherent in providing applicant-level data. “That risks particular privacy concerns there,” Harpalani said. “If the individual data from a single applicant can all be linked — all the data, the grade, the test score, their race, ethnicity, other features about them — then that applicant might be able to be identified as an individual. And that could be problematic, that could run in violation of the FERPA,” he added...
The complaint asks a federal court to compel Harvard to turn over “documents relating to applicant-level admissions decisions” that the Department of Justice said it requested as part of the review. Jonathan D. Glater, a professor of law at University of California, Berkeley, said the DOJ’s demand may run afoul of FERPA because the department is not an entity authorized to access student admissions records. “Student personally identifiable information is protected by FERPA,” Glater wrote in a statement. “DOJ is not a listed entity and this is not part of a criminal investigation, so I’m not sure how this works.” ...
Full story at https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2026/2/16/DOJ-lawsuit-expert-analysis/.
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