Halls of Ivy, and Snooping

Summertime, and the living is anything but easy for many high school students. Instead of lounging in sun-soaked deck chairs, college-bound soon-to-be-seniors are hunching over computer screens, grinding out self-serving essays and padding resumes. Months later, they will be nervously staring at the screen again.

Over the last few years, the Internet has allowed many colleges to shave days off students’ agonizing wait to hear whether a college has accepted or rejected them.

It’s a good system, but ham-fisted hacking by Princeton University recently revealed its vulnerability to two troubling trends: the erosion of privacy in the Internet age and increasingly cutthroat competition between universities.

It seems that Princeton University Admissions Director Stephen E. LeMenager used the birth dates and Social Security numbers of several students who had applied to that Ivy League school to break into a restricted Web page that archrival Yale University used to notify students whether it had accepted them to the class of 2006.

LeMenager maintains he was just testing the security of the site. Yeah, right. More likely is that Princeton was staking out the competition. LeMenager nosed around, for instance, to see what Yale had decided on relatively high-profile applicants, including President Bush’s niece, whose acceptance was viewed four times in one afternoon, and the grandson of a famous Notre Dame football coach. Princeton could use such information to determine whether to sic its high-pressure deal-closers on these coveted kids.

College applicants reveal themselves with the understanding that the information is only for the eyes of a select few in an admissions office. LeMenager’s actions breached that trust, and probably the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, which is intended to safeguard the student personal information so increasingly abundant in cyberspace these days.

Let’s hope the nation’s universities respond to the Princeton mini-scandal with another layer of security, like the special pass codes in use at some schools. Either that or risk leaving confidential information as fodder for a hackers’ free-for-all.