In last month's column, as a new registrar, I started with a hard‐nosed approach to disclosing any education records. But I shortly realized that these third‐party requests were attempting to gather student information that, for the most part, would benefit students. So it was in our mutual interests to cooperate and disclose the information that the third party requested. Of course, our FERPA training sessions provided many practical instances where we discussed what we could disclose and what we could not. All staff understood FERPA well … and, if they had a question, they referred it to me or my assistant. And there were plenty of questions.
Richard Rainsberger (2026) studied this question.