FERPA is the Federal Education Rights and Privacy Act. You can learn more about this law by visiting this page maintained by the FAS Registrar. If you enact a FERPA block with your degree school Registrar’s office as a student or as an alum, it remains active until you contact the Registrar’s office with instructions to remove it. Thus, the regulations protecting your identity are carried over to alumni systems. The only way to lift a FERPA block is through a Registrar’s Office.
While FERPA does not specifically pertain to alumni records, the law requires Harvard to protect student education record data after individuals leave the University. Education records contain information from a student’s enrollment period, such as grades, graduation dates, and programs/degree titles. As long as a FERPA block is active, the law prevents the University from disclosing personally identifiable information from education records to persons outside of Harvard (e.g., graduation date and program/degree title), including to other alumni on secure networks, absent the former student’s permission or recourse to one of the statutory exceptions. This data is treated like any other education record data that is subject to FERPA.
Alumni Affairs and Development (AA&D) administers the digital Alumni Directory. To ensure transparency, support effective communication among alumni, and enable full access to Directory functionality, AA&D requires certain alumni data derived from education records to remain visible (school, degree, degree year and additional information).
Due to this requirement, alumni with active FERPA blocks experience the Directory differently than their peers. Specifically:
- Your profile and all associated degree information are hidden from other users of the Directory.
- To ensure transparency and allow others in the online Directory to know who you are (name) and why you are a member (degree information), those with FERPA blocks will not be able to:
- Email other members through the site
- Join the Career Network
- Post a Class Note
- Post to the Message Board
- Submit an entry to the College Red Book
- When you log into the Directory, you will be reminded of your active FERPA block and the restrictions on your experience.