In the mid-2010s, Ivy League students discovered in waves that an under-discussed law gave them the right to view their own admissions documents. Thousands of students who had been accepted into the most selective institutions in the country requested and were granted access to records that detailed how they made it in; then, schools started deleting the files.
This controversy surrounded an educational funding amendment passed in 1974 known as the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), which entitles students to access and control the sharing of any educational files schools may keep on them. While its application to admissions documents has been a point of contention since before the act’s passing, admitted students have been legally entitled to view their admissions documents since then.
As soon as students started mass-requesting these files, colleges discouraged the process. Yale Law School announced that it would delete all admissions files in 2015, just as the first wave of Ivy FERPA requests came in. While few other colleges have followed suit, school newspapers across the country have reported that less and less information could be gleaned from what is left of students’ files.
While a Stanford student who accessed her file in 2015 reported being able to see “basic simple comments” on her admissions file, a student at that same institution in 2024 could only view evaluative categories, numbers and a few adjectives to describe themselves.
Carleton now deletes any of these descriptors from students’ files. At Carleton, this process is known as ‘file maintenance,’ and the details of deleting admissions notes are still somewhat unclear. When students request a document, they can only view their “overall academic” and “overall non-academic” scores on a numeric scale.
At Carleton, students rarely request to view their admissions documents, but when it does happen, they are given the file with the papers and grades they submitted to the Admissions office and about a quarter page of numbers culminating in these two scores.
As the document representing the contract between students and the school, the Carleton student handbook briefly addresses the process for requesting admissions documents. In the student handbook section on FERPA, the document describes the Dean of Students Office, not the Admissions Office, as the custodians of the documents. So, students wanting to view their information would first have to issue a request to the Dean of Students, which would then be diverted to the one individual in the Admissions Office who reads those documents.
FERPA was created because documents that students didn’t know about were following them in life well beyond reason. An offhanded note about how a ten-year-old child “seems troubled” could have been written into that child’s file without them knowing and go on to be shown to their college professors.
While not against the law, the practice of admissions file deletion and maintenance bars students from these protections. It prevents students from viewing files that contain the very information that has resulted in perhaps the most important decision in their young lives.
A 2002 Supreme Court ruling known as Gonzaga et al. v. Doe means that students can no longer sue schools based on FERPA rights. So, the entirety of the enforcement of FERPA is now under the purview of the Department of Education and its code, under which deleting admissions files is entirely legal, as long as there is no active request for them.
However, for colleges, these files do present real threats. College admissions are becoming an increasingly litigious field. After the SFFA v. Harvard ruling, the Students for Fair Admissions have shown a willingness to pursue action against schools that have maintained or expanded their BIPOC admissions rates.
In the current political environment, avoiding practices that risk litigation, especially those pointed at DEI in admissions, is a defendable strategy. However, the universal deletion of any valuable information in student files seems like an extreme measure, even if it’s not an uncommon practice. One student I spoke to, Jai Miles, ’27, who didn’t know that FERPA rights weren’t completely ceded upon applying to Carleton, said that deleting files “makes me think there’s something in there that you don’t want students to see.”
Carleton’s current filing method in their admissions review process often means that these notes aren’t even created in the first place. Peer review of individual files implies that many of the “admissions notes” readers have on applicants are shared verbally between two readers.
The issue of accessing these files is complex and varied, and the degree to which we want to surrender our access to this information to protect institutional privacy is a real conversation that students and administrators should engage in. The problem, as I view it, is most students don’t even know to ask those questions in the first place. Remember that the information in our admissions files follows us after matriculation. Carleton disseminates relevant information about testing levels and personal concerns to the Dean’s Offices and appropriate academic support services.
Carleton students deserve to access and control the flow of information that directly impacts them. Schools deserve to protect themselves.