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A Mississippi student is suing her high school after a cheerleading coach demanded her Facebook password, then used it to access and disseminate private email.
According to the lawsuit the coach, Tommie Hill, told the Pearl High School cheerleading squad that they would all have to give her their Facebook passwords. Several squad members responded by deleting their accounts from their cell phones, but sophomore Mandi Jackson complied with the request.
The suit claims that Hill accessed Jackson’s account later that day, and forwarded Jackson’s private Facebook messages to at least four other school officials. The officials then “publicly reprimanded … and humiliated” Jackson, suspended her from cheerleader training, and banned her from other school events.
Jackson’s attorney, Rita Nahlik Silin, told the Student Press Law Center that Hill’s actions were “a blatant violation of her right to privacy, her right to free speech, her right to free association and her right to due process. It’s egregious to me,” she said, “that a 14-year-old girl is essentially told you can’t speak your mind, can’t publish anything, can’t be honest or have an open discussion with someone without someone else essentially eavesdropping.”
As Lee Baker of the Citizen Media Law Project notes, this incident reflects a not-uncommon belief on the part of authority figures that “they have the right to invade others’ privacy and eavesdrop on private or semi-private conversations merely because these conversations take place online.” In Baker’s words, “asking for a student’s Facebook password in order to read private messages is akin to asking the student’s permission to install a wiretap on his or her phone.”
A new report on student loan debt finds the proportion of community college students saddled with debt at graduation has skyrocketed in the last five years.
The report, a College Board analysis of the U.S. Education Department’s National Postsecondary Student Aid Study, found that nearly half of 2007-08 community college graduates took out education loans to pay for school, up from thirty-seven percent in 2003-04. Of those students who did take out loans, half accumulated debts of more than $10,000.
Borrowing rose from 30% to 38% of graduates of public community colleges, and from 90% to 98% of graduates of for-profit two-year schools. The debt burden among those taking out loans was higher at the private two-years, too — 43% had debts of more than $20,000, compared to just 13% of public community college grads.
All told, 59% of college graduates left school with at least some educational debt in 2007-08, up from 55% just four years earlier. Students’ median debt rose from $13,663 to $15,123 in the same period, an 11% rise.
These figures exclude credit card debt and loans from friends and family, by the way, so the true numbers are even higher.
Update: As the Chronicle of Higher Education notes, debt burdens for four-year college grads vary dramatically by college type too. They point out that “10 percent of students at four-year public institutions had $40,000 or more in loans, while 22 percent of graduates of private four-year institutions and 25 percent of students graduating from for-profit four-year institutions had that level of debt.”
studentactivism.net 
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