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Comment by sulam | Hacker News Reader

Speaking as someone paying what is effectively a second mortgage so my nephew can go to school, I expect the school to let me know how it's going.

I'm not saying MIT is in the right here, but if you want parents or others completely disengaged, then you need to not engage them financially.

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I disagree with you. It's your choice to engage financially with the university, and you should do so knowing that if you want to know how it's going, you need to talk to the student, not the university -- we have laws like FERPA for a reason.

He told the university to disclose grades to me. No laws are being broken. This is his choice, just like it's my choice to send them a crapton of money.

I agree. If you finance something, you are allowed to exercise some degree of control over it.

You are. The control you're allowed is the right to decide to stop paying.

He told the school to disclose grades to you. Not his personal conduct. Most parent's accept that their kids are going to drink, and have sex, and maybe do some drugs in college. They probably aren't happy about it but they know it's going to happen to some degree or another. That is a huge difference from having your only communication with the school be basically a PSA that your kid is living in some sort of college sponsored hippie, drug den that's going to cause them to fail out. That's what people are taking issues with.

Maybe they were right to contact parents. I've never been to Senior House and don't know the ins and outs what went on there. But as someone who has worked in ResLife and been responsible for kids, I can say without a doubt MIT took the nuclear option. At most colleges, you can be put on academic probation, and even kicked out without the university notifying your parents directly.

As I said above, I don't endorse MIT's behavior. However, there is a spectrum here. It sounds like you think it's ok for him and I to make an agreement that the school will disclose his grades to me in return for getting a free (to him) education.

If I'd taken this further, and asked him to disclose his personal conduct, and he agreed, would you have a problem?

Keep in mind I actually don't care about his personal conduct. I care whether or not he's taking school seriously, and I am using grades as a proxy for that. I take the money seriously, and if he's not going to take the benefits the money is purchasing seriously, then I have the option to stop paying for it.

The problem I see is that this is a slippery slope. Suppose your kid gets into two schools -- say a cheap(er) in-state school and MIT. Either way you're paying for it, and you know the kid will get a perfectly good CS education at either school. However, having MIT on their resume will be worth something, as will the relationships they make. Perhaps it's even worth the huge additional expense, assuming they take full advantage of it. At what point does the additional value beyond the curriculum, which the school is happy to charge for, give me some interest (both intellectual and legal) in how all of that is going?

I ask not to argue that MIT is correct here, but to try and illustrate some of the complexity. I am not an ethicist but it seems like an interesting question to me.

Ok, that's a bit different than how I read your earlier post, I thought you were saying that parents/relatives should be entitled to that info solely on the basis of footing the bill.

Then you should expect the school to tell you these things because the student asked them to, not because you're paying for it. The first and second halves of your first sentence are unrelated to each other.

It's not a choice. In Canada at least you are disqualified from financial aid (including loans) based on your parents' tax returns. The law expects you to pay for your kids' school if you earn a middle class income or more.

Ok, I can see it from that perspective -- we have similar financial aid limits in the U.S. I still think it's a choice, even if it's one that's structurally difficult for many people to make.

However, this is mostly orthogonal to the issue that most university students are adults, and the university has no business sharing their personal information on their behalf (without their explicit consent of course).

Same in the US; I had a friend who was estranged from her parents, and so they refused to sign a FAFSA form, which made her unable to qualify for pretty much all financial aid. The college president had to step in to have an exception made for her, since all need-based scholarships provided by that college (and most others) are based upon FAFSA.

That's not how it works, assuming your nephew is an adult. You, as an adult, are making a decision to give another adult a lot of money. That gift creates zero obligations on any third party, and should not even create any obligations by your nephew unless you explicitly arranged for this in advance.

From what I hear, a lot of parents have your attitude. They call up the school asking about grades and performance with the attitude that they deserve to know because they're paying for it. They inevitably get shot down, because not only is giving out this information to paying parents not what's expected, but it's explicitly illegal to do so under federal law without the student's written permission.

I'm giving the money to the school, not to him to give to the school. The mechanics of this are perhaps irrelevant, except that the school offers this option for me to get his grades sent to me by them, similar to how I give the money to them.

My "attitude" is that I told him I would pay for his school if I got to see his grades. Pretty simple. I'd be happy not to pay and not see his grades -- I'm not his parent, and for my own kids (while this is further into the future), if they can pay for school without my help then I don't think I should know anything they don't want to tell me.

The school doesn't care that you're paying, nor should they. If you made this a condition of paying, then that's fine, but that's between you and your nephew. The school's involvement is limited to accepting his written permission to give you his information.

Your attitude about this is reasonable, but you're extrapolating to a position that is harder to defend.

Your agreement with your nephew is defensible and enforceable. You fund his education, he provides you with his grades. That makes sense.

But that agreement is between you and your nephew, not you and your nephew's school. So much is that the case that at some state schools (I know it's at least true at Illinois, where we just sent our son), they won't allow students to sign FERPA consent forms for release of grades on days when parents are likely to be present.

> Speaking as someone paying what is effectively a second mortgage so my nephew can go to school, I expect the school to let me know how it's going.

Why? If you're paying your spouses' medical bills, do you expect to be included on personal, private conversations between the spouse and his or her doctor? (Spoiler: you need the spouse's consent for that!)

No one is forcing parents (or you) to pay for someone else's college, but as adults, the university should manage the students' autonomy by not sending "nastygrams" home.

Why do you think you're entitled to invading your nephew's privacy simply because you gave him some money?

I guess he invaded his own privacy, by agreeing that he would arrange for his grades to be sent to me by the school.

Also, while your straw man was amusing, it's also mostly wrong. The rules regarding PHI disclosure from covered entities to spouses is fairly complex -- not to mention non-spouses. You might be interested in this link:

https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/faq/488/does-hip...

You should ask your nephew how it is going. As an adult.

I ask him about birth control and whether or not he's using it as an adult. When I have to pay the school thousands of dollars a month (averaged out), I asked for the ability to find out directly from the school how it's going, and thankfully there was a way to make that happen. Seems like my request was not considered out of the ordinary...

If you can't trust your nephew to give you honest answers to your questions and discussions, how can you trust him to utilize your gift to its fullest extent? Or at least come out of it in a good way?

I was dirt poor, and similarly had a family member help with my college when, even after a full tuition scholarship and some government grants there was still a lot of bills left to pay. It wasn't a large sum that he paid, but he never grilled me about my status. His position on it was "You are a smart kid and you've earned this opportunity"

Meanwhile, years earlier my sister squandered large amounts of money partying at a supremely expensive private school. We couldn't exactly afford it in the first place, and attempting to exert influence over long distances caused huge amounts of stress on our family.

Do be careful. To some people, the worry of disappointing or angering the one funding the opportunity can be overwhelming. Having positive and supportive, yet frank discussions with your nephew would really help him, especially if/when he fails. But being overbearing could in fact make his college experience less positive and beneficial.

Hope I wasn't too condescending with my overly long rant

That's very generous of you. When my parents got married, my grandparents paid for their honeymoon. Had the resort where they were staying reported to their parents what they did there, they would have been outraged. Would something like this also be accepted in America?

I don't know what he's doing, I know what grades he got a few times a year.

He asked for money. One of the terms for my giving him money was to know whether or not my money is having the desired outcome. If he didn't like that he could get money elsewhere on far worse terms. Welcome to adulthood!

Of course not, but it's hardly the same.

For the sake of argument, take the university at their word: that they believed there was an unsafe environment fostered in this dorm, and that the students were markedly underperforming their peers. As such the University is selling a defective good to the parents, and they are trying to remediate it.

That sounds quite reasonable to me.

However, are they infantilizing the students and preventing them from growing in maturity and judgement in the process?

Yep, they sure are.

The problem US universities are finding themselves in, is when parents are ponying up small fortunes, they are not interested in preserving 'freedom to fail' which is necessary for growth.

This is a University that would rather someone die than they have to admit they did something wrong. Nobody is giving them the benefit of the doubt.

> As such the University is selling a defective good to the parents

The university is selling a possibly "defective" good to the student. The parents are gifting money to the student to pay for that service.

Actually it's not a gift. If it was a gift, it would exceed the amount of money I can give him and would trigger taxes for him, and I'd need to give him _more_ money to pay those taxes.

I don't know how this works legally, but I do know (because I asked) that this isn't considered a gift according to the IRS.

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