The U.S. Education Department’s research division, the Institute of Education Sciences, is developing a database that would track students’ progress through college while protecting their privacy, the division’s director, Grover J. (Russ) Whitehurst, said this week. Speaking to the institute’s board, Mr. Whitehurst said the database would resolve many of the privacy concerns that derailed the Bush administration’s plan to create a “unit record” database using students’ Social Security numbers (The Chronicle, July 7).

Still, he told the board, “right now this is just a design exercise,” not a full-fledged program all but ready to roll out.

According to Mr. Whitehurst, here is how the new database would work: First, encrypted college-transcript data would be sent to a “trusted third party” outside of the Education Department. That party would know students’ names and Social Security numbers, but would not be able to decrypt the transcript information. The third party would strip the names and Social Security numbers from the data, and assign each student record a new identification number. It would return the revised record to the Education Department, which could then decrypt the transcript data.

The idea, Mr. Whitehurst explained, is that no one player would be able to see both the identifying data and the transcript data.

Mr. Whitehurst also said that the department was laying the groundwork for a major redesign of its College Opportunities Online Locator Web site, known as Cool. He said that the redesign would give students and parents the ability to create their own “league tables” of colleges based on the criteria important to them. The secretary of education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education recommended the creation of such a “searchable, consumer-friendly database” in its final draft report (The Chronicle, August 11).