Given the standing ovation Senator Rand Paul received at the blue bastion of UC Berkeley, the following news likely to add fuel to the fire of anger young Americans are experiencing over privacy right violations.

Breitbart’s Frances Martel has this report:

A study released by the Gates Foundation is promoting a system that would track the careers of college graduates long after they receive their degrees, attacking the National Association for Independent Colleges and Universities for promoting laws that prevent up-close surveillance of students by the government.

The study, titled “College Blackout,” argues that the proposed system, the Student Unit Recording System, would allow a more nuanced approach to studying the value of higher education. This requires knowing the life story of every student and tracking information like income after college and major simultaneously. The data already exists, the study argues, though spread out across a number of government institutions, like the Social Security Administration and the IRS.

While private institutions and some states keep these records, the study argues that the federal government should have this information pooled in one place.

What currently prevents such a database is a 2008 law that bans the project. “Without the ban,” the study explains, “the Department of Education could use student-level data already collected and stored by schools, states, and the federal government; safeguard it; and link it across schools and to other data sources – a structure known as a student unit record data system.”

The three main arguments the Gates Foundation paper proposes are that such private information is already in possession of the government, just distributed among a number of federal departments; that only the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (NAICU) opposes the system; and that the benefits of having a better feel for the performance of a school outweigh the costs of having the federal government track the career success of millions long after they have graduated.

The villains of the Foundation’s story are the heads of the NAICU, who are portrayed as a nefarious lobby of wealthy insiders who overthrow an earnest effort to record data that would hold their institutions accountable. The NAICU fears such a system, the study claims, because it is “largely independent of state money or oversight,” which makes the group dependent on tuition dollars. As President Obama threatened to link those dollars that come from federal loans to a student unit record system, the NAICU opposes such a system, the study claims.