Federal Funding Cuts May Signal the End of FERPA Protections for Student Data
Private student data may soon be legally up for grabs
Image credit: “Datafication” Kathryn Conrad / https://betterimagesofai.org / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
It has been quite a spring for education and research in the United States. DOGE techbros have been running rampant throughout government agencies and programs, slashing funds1 while getting unprecedented, and arguably illegal, access to huge amounts of sensitive data. And anyone in education who hasn’t Rip-Van-Winkled their way through the last few months knows that the Trump administration has been gutting funds for both K-12 and higher ed specifically.
The relationship between accessing sensitive data and slashing funds is perhaps tighter than you might think.
Some K-12 schools rely heavily on federal funding; some much less. It is the latter group that actually concerns me most right now--because if a school doesn’t receive much federal funding, then it’s easy to justify cutting it entirely without quite the political uproar that might come from cutting it from heavily dependent schools.
Why does that matter? Because FERPA is tied to federal funding.
A primer from the Department of Education:
The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) is a federal law that affords parents the right to have access to their children’s education records, the right to seek to have the records amended, and the right to have some control over the disclosure of personally identifiable information from the education records. When a student turns 18 years old, or enters a postsecondary institution at any age, the rights under FERPA transfer from the parents to the student (“eligible student”).
As a student and then teacher who, except for my graduate education, has learned and then taught at public (K-12 and university) institutions for most of my life, I assumed that FERPA applied to all educational institutions. And indeed, it applies to most, because most private colleges and universities also receive some sort of federal funding. A lesser-known aspect of FERPA, however, is the following (from the Parent Guide):
FERPA applies to schools that receive funding under any program administered by the Department [of Education]. Private and faith-based schools at the elementary and secondary levels generally do not receive such funding and are, therefore, generally not subject to FERPA.
In other words, if federal funding is totally removed from a school or program, so too are federal privacy regulations for student data.
This would mean that the educational institutions that receive the least federal funding would logically be the first to be impacted. For instance, Mark Lieberman’s April 25, 2025 article in Education Week about the Trump administration’s cuts to K-12 education notes the following:
Virtually every district gets some money from the federal government. But some states and districts rely on federal funding far more than others, depending on a variety of factors such as the number and share of students who qualify for additional aid.
In 2022, six states—Alaska, Arkansas, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, and South Dakota—got more than one-fifth of their K-12 funding from the federal government. Four other states—Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and New York—got less than 10 percent from federal sources.
Let’s just consider the amount of personally identifiable student data that would be up for grabs if federal funding were cut from just K-12 public schools in the last four states. The New York State Department of Education reports 2023-24 K-12 public school enrollment at 2,418,513. That’s a lot of personal student data. Add that to the other states that receive less than 10% from federal funds and you have close to 5 million K-12 public school students whose private, personally identifiable data would no longer be protected. Add private schools and colleges and universities that receive federal funds to the mix (i.e., most of them), and it puts a new spin on the federal funding attack on, say, Harvard.
In short: it seems increasingly likely that the federal education funding cuts aren’t really about what’s being taught in schools, or the quality of private v. public schools, or whatever other hot-button, politically charged smoke screen they are throwing up. These cuts are about making it possible to access personal student data on an unprecedented scale.
Amongst the funding cuts was our AI & Digital Literacy Institute, funded by the NEH Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities. Our institute, the IATDH in general, and the NEH’s AI Initiative (for which our institute was listed as an example before the webpage was taken down) were all cut despite their focus on what is ostensibly the Trump administration’s executive order on the importance of “AI Education for American Youth.” In case there was any question, critical AI literacy is not what is intended in that order.
We’re all well on our way to being ‘just another brick in the wall’ / ‘just another data point on the screen.’ (Which is not to say that machine learning has no place. It does. We just shouldn’t give aways the keys to learning in the process.