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Illuminating college outcomes, while protecting privacy
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Joining sensitive data sets from the Department of Education and the IRS in a way that protected privacy resulted in College Scorecard - a platform that allows students and families to simultaneously consider the cost and evidenced outcomes of a range of possible degrees.
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Summary
Educational accountability, enabled by data collaboration
The challenge: a privacy-safe solution for joining data on educational degrees and financial outcomes.
The Department of Education sought to connect data about degrees with their financial outcomes, from data managed by the IRS.
The resulting insights would be useful to students and parents, but producing the data product involved significant individual data privacy risk.
A collaboration with Tumult enabled the privacy-protected solution, and College Scorecard now helps students and families be better-informed around degree and school choice.
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key outcomes
Solutions
Differential privacy safely unlocks the power of combining data from the Department of Education and the IRS. DP can support powerful data collaborations within and in collaborations outside your enterprise.
Support powerful collaboration.
Reveal insights while maintaining privacy.
Expand the audience that can benefit from insights.
goals
Support students and families to make informed decisions about higher education
Linking data on student majors and educational institutions with financial outcomes helps families make informed decisions.
Increase students’ and families’ access to information
Enhance decision-making by providing easy access to financial outcomes data, by major and college.
Maintain the privacy of sensitive information
Ensure the confidentiality of individuals' data while sharing insights on academic choices and their economic impacts.
our process
A collaborative, calibrated process
Our process is designed to maximize insights and utility while maintaining the privacy of highly sensitive data sets.
- Identify data that needs to be released
- Identify privacy/accuracy requirements
- Understand parameters that affect tradeoffs
- Visualize privacy loss vs. accuracy tradeoffs
- Tune parameters
- Track approvals to catalog and manage data releases
- Monitor and audit
- Manage data re-use
the results
What value did the College Scorecard project produce?
The platform is the first to make it simple to search and compare colleges: their fields of study, costs, admissions rates and student outcomes.
Powerful and easy-to-use website for students and families
Increasing the transparency of information that helps users understand the costs and benefits of a higher education degree.
Robust data, actionable insights
The site makes it simple to compare college costs, student debt, graduation rates, admissions test scores and acceptance rates, student body diversity, and post-college earnings and much more.
Expanding data and utility
New updates include median earnings of graduates four years after graduations, new demographic data, including race/ethnicity data for full-time college staff, and student-to-faculty ratios.
More resources
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Revealing Wikipedia usage data while protecting privacy
Wikipedia’s volunteers want a systematic way to prioritize where to focus their work. Which entries are being read most? By which readers where? DP was the technology that solved for the twin, and potentially contradictory, goals of privacy preservation and actionable insights.
Using differential privacy to safely release earnings data on post-secondary grads
When the U.S. Census Bureau needed to release data on the median earnings of post-secondary graduates, one Tumult Lab founder helped the Census Bureau design a new differentially private algorithm.