By Julia Lawrence. Students looking to calculate the cost of college might be giving up private information without even knowing it, according to AlterNet. Worse, it could be colleges themselves who are complicit in this kind of privacy breach because they fail to notify students that the use of these kinds of data collection tools could result in their data being repackaged and sold to outside vendors.Many students consider price calculators to be a good consumer information tools that provide them with a reliable estimate of the total price of attendance for a particular school — but to arrive at that estimate, the calculators ask for a large amount of personal and financial data.
Schools don’t provide these calculators voluntarily. They are required to do so by a requirement put into place during the reauthorization of the 2008 Higher Education Act. Read more...
