College Kids Have Too Much Privacy

How would you feel if you are a parent and you received a phone call from your daughter’s roommate telling you that your daughter has dropped out of college 2 years ago and you never knew about it? Wouldn’t you blame the college for not informing you that your daughter has dropped out of college? A parent received a phone call from her daughter’s roommate telling her that she should know that her daughter did not graduated from college, the mother was shocked because her daughter told her before that she was just skipping the ceremony, but in fact, she was not just skipping ceremony, she did not attend any of her classes for the past 2 years. Most parents in this situation would blame the college for not informing them that their children dropped out of college because they think their children are still not mature enough to make good choices. Students can not take all of the responsibility, they did not ask for it. Parents have the right to know if their child is suffering. Parents should have an access to their children’s college informations or at least be informed about how their children are doing in college. Congress should remove the law FERPA so parents could check their children’s records. Students are not mature enough to make good choices, as Dan Caldwell, a political science professor at Pepperdine said "... I can't let the parents know, nor can I let them know their son or daughter may be getting a 'D.' It seems funny because if they are 17, I can." Every year, over 1.2 million students drop out of high school in the United States alone. I agree with the professor’s point of view because students do not change a lot in 1 year, going from 17 years old to 18 years old does not change you a lot, it just give you more power, and most importantly, all responsibility. Students can not take all the responsibility, they never asked for responsibility. They were happy, they did what they could and got motivations from their parents to improve their grades at school. FERPA leaves you all alone when you go to college, you get no motivations from anyone, no one tells you to go do what you have to do to make your life better. Parents have the right to know if their child is suffering. They are family, not strangers, I agree with Herb Pardes, former dean of the faculty of medicine at Columbia when he said. "It's another not to alert parents when a school may know about the potential downfall of a child. It's not even so much about the money; it's about these are the people who most care about that young person, and they have the right to know if he or she is suffering." Students won’t just go tell their parents that they are doing bad in college, they are going to feel that it is their responsibilities, the idea of responsibilities that FERPA created in these young people’s minds is that you do everything on your own, so if they think they can not do it, they just drop out. So parents deserve to know if their child is suffering from college, they could help him because they are the closest in his or her life. Removing the law FERPA will improve the college completion statistics. It will reduce the number of students who drop out, and make their life better and easier.