U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings recently unveiled a 5-point plan to revamp the way students pay for and attend university. Four of these have the potential to make it easier for college students to get and keep the money they need to pay for college.

But one point, in particular, would blatantly undermine our right to privacy.

While some of Spellings’ recommendations, in theory, would better prepare students for the rigors of applying to college, others put the government a little too close to our personal information.

She had the right idea by increasing need-based student aid and making the federal financial aid process more palpable, but her plan to track student performance and financial information — like the government currently does for elementary and secondary students — seems like a needless invasion of privacy.

Spellings said she would “work to pull together the same kind of privacy-protected student-level data we already have for K through 12 students. And use that data to create a higher education information system”

The original plan for the database was to use Social Security numbers to track students’ academic progress, but lawmakers in the House of Representatives passed legislation prohibiting the creation of a database that would hold such sensitive information.

Instead, the database will now feature “individual identification numbers” to track trends in student finances and performance.

While there is less of a threat that information will fall into the wrong hands by using random identification numbers, it is still a needless violation of privacy.

Spellings also argues that tracking a student’s GPA would “hold schools accountable for quality” in the long-run.

Unlike high school, though, performance can’t always be linked to a particular teacher or institution. At the college level, much of a student’s performance is determined by his or her will to succeed.

Often college is an uphill battle of self-motivation, not one necessarily based on skewed grading systems of bad professors.

The government has no right to track this personal information because it does not foot the whole bill for higher education.

Until the government pays our tuition, it should not have the luxury of knowing our financial and academic status even if this “information will not only help with decision-making it will also hold schools accountable for quality,” as Spellings wrongly asserts.