FundSvcs Community

The primary U.S. law governing privacy of educational records is FERPA, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, which, among other things, governs what information from educational records may be disclosed, to whom and for what purposes.

One of the provisions of FERPA introduces the concept of "directory information," defined in the code as information that would not generally be considered to be a violation of privacy if disclosed.  The FERPA regulations provide more detail:

Directory information includes, but is not limited to, the student's name; address; telephone listing; electronic mail address; photograph; date and place of birth; major field of study; grade level; enrollment status (e.g., undergraduate or graduate, full-time or part-time); dates of attendance; participation in officially recognized activities and sports; weight and height of members of athletic teams; degrees, honors, and awards received; and the most recent educational agency or institution attended.

The definition in the regulations go on to discuss certain information that is not directory information, the FERPA status of a student ID, etc.

As with several provisions of FERPA, each institution is required to publish its own definition of directory information, which then is governs that institution.  (For example, in Oregon the definition of directory information for public universities is enacted in state law, and does not include date of birth, so public universities in Oregon cannot treat the date of birth as directory information, even though it is included in the illustrative list in the regulations, and other institutions are free to consider date of birth to be directory information.)

FERPA also allows individual students to opt out of the designation of some or all of their information as directory information, so that if a particular student, for example, declines to allow their telephone number to be considered directory information, then their phone number is not directory information, even though the telephone number of other students is directory information.

FERPA allows (but does not require) directory information to be disclosed to anyone (unlike other FERPA provisions that only allow disclosure to certain audiences, such as school officials)

So, if your college's published definition of directory information follows the list above, it would seem that directory information would include the information that you list-at least for students who have not opted out from the designation of directory information.  FERPA would, under those conditions, allow the disclosure of this information to your researcher.

Of course, that just covers the federal privacy law issues.  Your institution might have further restrictions-FERPA, under recent regulatory updates, allows a school of allow the restriction of directory information to certain purposes, though not many seem to do that, and there may be internal processes to release information outside the usual audiences, to release information for research, etc.