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Opinion
Here Comes the Unfunded Mandate for Your IT Department!
2/22/2007
The department's latest broadside is being dubbed "Huge IPEDS," named after the current much smaller federal government higher education database:
Inside Higher Ed reported in December that the department was contemplating such an expansion, which its officials had internally dubbed "Huge IPEDS," as an alternative to the more controversial federal "unit records" system. (IPEDS is the federal government's primary database for information about colleges, their staffs and their students, although it doesn't collect information about individual students, like the unit records system the department also coverts.) In recent weeks, department officials had seemed to back away from the idea, telling a meeting of college association leaders as recently as this month that no such expansion of IPEDS was planned soon.
Source: Inside Higher Ed
One professor of education said that the proposal "may not be very well thought through at this point." Another, commenting on the article quoted above, said: "What you read here is a tragic testimony to ignorance." Another said: "One can only hope that this fad passes into oblivion, like the many others that have emerged over the years, relatively soon."
One thing's certain: If this happens, it's going to be more work for college and university IT staff, as well as for many other administrators, especially staff in institutional research departments, which are typically understaffed at most schools already. And the race is on. The department seemed to be moving at a relatively slow pace a couple of years ago, but as the time remaining on this administration's clock is now under two calendar years, it seems to be moving faster, with even a little bit of desperation.
No matter what, there will be more mandates on colleges and universities, but I'm on the side of those who want to keep it "voluntary," with whatever "mandates" there are being imposed by peers rather than the federal government. Isn't that amazing? I end up on this one, being on the small government side. And I'm a liberal.
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