Shopping for bad apples

The U.S. Department of Education announced in March it will use “secret shoppers” to ensure colleges are accurately reporting institutional information such as school accreditation and graduates’ employment rates. The agency intends to crack down on schools that falsify such info in their effort to attract prospective students.

Secret shopper participants will apply for admission and financial aid at colleges and compare school communication with federal regulations. The Education Department said it would especially look for schools that inflate their value to military or veteran students, who receive government funding for education.

Since President Joe Biden took office, his administration has approved billions of dollars in ­student loan forgiveness for students from schools that reportedly misled prospective students. Two for-profit schools, Corinthian Colleges and ITT Technical Institute, closed in 2015 and 2016 after officials penalized them for misleading students about their programs. Last year, the department also approved student loan forgiveness for about 1,800 students from DeVry University, arguing the school advertised deceptive ­numbers about students’ post-­graduation jobs.

The Education Department’s Federal Student Aid Office of Enforcement will run the secret shopper program. During the Trump administration, former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos closed the enforcement office, but the Biden administration reopened it in October 2021.

Not-so-private education

A recent study by University of Chicago and New York University researchers found that education technology apps and websites pose risks to student privacy.

Since the pandemic, schools and teachers have incorporated websites and apps like Zoom, Google Classroom, College Board, and Khan Academy, and most of these sites and apps use cookies and other web trackers. But according to the new study, to be presented at an April academic conference in Hamburg, Germany, about 7 percent of education vendor websites used “session recorders,” more invasive tools that can track what users click on or type. According to the researchers, teachers typically decided what educational tech to incorporate in classes, often focusing on educational benefits without considering privacy issues.

A December report by Internet Safety Labs similarly found that 96 percent of school-recommended apps share user data with third parties. —L.D.