DeKALB | In a speech Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings outlined plans for the Commission on the Future of Higher Education.

Spellings talked about asking Congress to make more financial aid available to low-income students and warned public universities to keep their costs reasonable for students.

She also focused on more accurate record-keeping of individual college students as well as records outlining things like graduation and enrollment rates at public schools.

Spellings explained a plan proposed in 2004 to create a “unit record” system that tracks the progress of individual college students anonymously by their social security number. Today, Spellings said the plan is to make the records available by an identification number not associated with the student’s social security number or school ID number.

The problem with the record system now, aside from the security issue, is information about students who transfer, drop out or take longer than the traditional four years to earn their degree is not specifically recorded and therefore provides statistics that aren’t useful, said Vice Provost Earl Seaver.

“About 50 percent of students that start at NIU get their degrees here. Now we will be able to get a better idea of where the other half are going when they leave NIU,” Seaver said.

Although the prototype has been around since 2004, Seaver said there is a lot that still needs to be done before the system is fully functional.

“There’s a lot of detail that needs to be filled in,” he said.

Spellings also addressed the records of entire colleges and how their progress is registered. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Web site, Spellings said the time has come for higher education to provide the same information to consumers that parents receive for their children’s elementary and secondary schools.

She compared the strategy of record-keeping with that of the No Child Left Behind Act and its way of getting specific results from students with standardized tests. Seaver said although some people won’t be satisfied with the association with No Child Left Behind, when parents are shopping for colleges for their students, the standardized test will tell them what they want to know.

“When they prepare to look at colleges, parents want to see the graduation rates and other information right in front of them and the tests will give them that,” Seaver said.

Lauren Stott is a Campus Reporter for the Northern Star.