As March Madness gets under way, a less widely noticed kind of intercollegiate competition is forcing students to churn endlessly through the higher-education system, wasting their own — and taxpayers’ — money.

In this game, the players score but it doesn’t count.

That’s what happens when students earn academic credit at one university or college, then try to transfer to another, which won’t accept it — even within the same states and systems. The result is that students end up spending far more time and money trying to finish their degrees, assuming that they even stick around to bother.

It’s a spectacle that may not have gotten as much attention in the past as NCAA basketball, but fed-up policymakers are starting to push for changes in the rules.

“One of the most common complaints a legislator gets from a constituent about higher education is, ‘My credits don’t transfer,’” says Davis Jenkins, senior researcher at Teachers College, Columbia University, who has studied the issue.

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“This is so common, but it’s heart-rending,” Jenkins says. “And it also pisses me off as a taxpayer.”

That’s because the problem is as costly as it is unnoticed.

A third of students now transfer sometime during their academic careers, the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center says, and a quarter of those change schools more than once.

When these students’ credits don’t transfer with them, they churn, seemingly endlessly, in college, piling up debt and wasting time repeating the same courses. It now takes full-time students, on average, 3.8 years to earn a two-year associate’s degree and 4.7 years to get a four-year bachelor’s degree, according to the advocacy organization Complete College America — further increasing the already high cost to families, and, at public universities, states. Only 61 percent of full-time students who set out to earn a four-year bachelor’s degree manage to do it within even eight years, Complete College America reports.

Part of the problem is that public universities are largely funded based on their enrollment, not on whether students actually graduate. So while an institution has a financial incentive to take transfer students to fill seats left vacant when other students drop out, it may not have a financial incentive to help them successfully finish college and move on.

“I don’t want to suggest that all that people are doing here is this cold calculation of costs and benefits, but there haven’t been explicit incentives to get the students out of there,” says Michael Lovenheim, a professor of policy analysis at Cornell who also has studied the transfer process.

Dragging out their degrees
Experts say the difficulty of transferring credits is a major reason students stay in college for so long. On average, students now accumulate — and pay for — a wasteful 80 credits toward associate’s degrees that should require only 60, and 136.5 for bachelor’s degrees that need only 120, Complete College America says.

Take Karen Hernandez. She started at St. John’s University in New York and transferred after a year and a half to Nassau Community College, where, after another year and a half, she received an associate’s degree. Then she moved again, to Columbia University, where she hopes to earn a bachelor’s degree in art history and human rights.

The first time Hernandez switched schools, only 27 of the 36 credits she had earned and paid for transferred. The second time, 55 credits transferred, out of 63. That means Hernandez lost 17 credits — and that, after three years in college, she is facing at least three years more to get a degree that is supposed to take a total of four years.

“It has definitely prolonged my educational career,” says Hernandez, 23.

Columbia wouldn’t accept credits for a class Hernandez had taken and passed in meteorology, for example, she says. “My dean said, ‘Well, we don’t know what that covers.’ I would think that would be so simple: It’s, like, about the weather.”

But university faculty at some institutions often question the quality of courses taught by university faculty at others.

“Snobbery,” Jenkins calls it.

 “Everybody feels that the way they do it is the right way,” says Janet L. Marling, director of the National Institute for the Study of Transfer Students at the University of North Georgia. “To admit that somebody else does it equally well can chip away at their foothold.”

Adds Dennis Jones, president of the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems: “There’s just the natural faculty hubris that says, ‘If I didn’t teach it, it can’t be any good.’”

Complications in the process
Even where transferring credits is possible, it can be extraordinarily complicated and misunderstood.

For example, while some credits from one school may be accepted by another, they may not count toward a major, something students often don’t find out until after they’ve transferred.

“Students are told, yes, your credits will transfer, and, yes, technically they do,” says Alison Kadlec, director of public engagement programs at Public Agenda, who has held focus-group sessions with students about the problem. “But if they don’t transfer toward your major, that’s a waste of time and money.”

That common experience stymied one frustrated student Jenkins met. “He probably wasted a year’s worth of courses,” Jenkins says. “It’s just a waste. These are motivated students, taking all these courses at their expense and ours, and they’re not getting anywhere. And that’s just wrong.”

A study in Texas found that students sometimes didn’t even learn if their credits were accepted until as long as four months after they transferred to a new school.

“It’s one thing if they’re swirling around because they don’t know what they’re doing,” Kadlec says. “But it’s another thing if these institutions can’t get their acts together to give them the information.”

Improving the advising process costs money, however, and forcing students to go through it — even if it’s for their own good — can be risky. When Klamath Community College in Oregon made orientation and advising mandatory, its enrollment fell 20 percent, costing it about $800,000 in state funding, the college’s president says.

Lawmakers step in to referee
Tired of waiting for universities and colleges to solve the problem, several state legislatures are now stepping in to impose reforms from the outside.

Florida has a statewide transfer policy guaranteeing that students who complete associate’s degrees at community colleges in that state can transfer all their credits to its four-year public universities. Legislators in Arkansas, Arizona, Kentucky and Tennessee have ordered similar changes.

But problems remain. It took Florida 10 years to bring its universities and colleges into line on transfer credits, for example. An analysis by a technical college in North Carolina found that only one of its English courses was accepted for core credit by all 16 of that state’s public universities. And some legislative efforts to make universities fix the transfer process have slammed up against the culture of competition.

Almost three years after California legislators demanded that anyone who earns an associate’s degrees at a community college be guaranteed transfer into the California State University system, for instance, students in two-thirds of all majors still don’t qualify, college and university officials there concede. The Campaign for College Opportunity, which pushed for the legislation, blames the California State campuses for being reluctant to accept community-college credit.

“We focus on losing time and money, but there’s also an impact on [students’] sense of hope and possibility,” Kadlec says. “Students are blaming themselves. And I’m listening to these stories and thinking, ‘Why aren’t you furious?’ And I think it’s because they’re thinking, ‘Maybe I should have known that these colleges are competitors.’”

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education-news outlet based at Teachers College, Columbia University.

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Once a year, a line of briefcase-wielding accountants in business suits files into an office at Texas Christian University.

They’re not there to check on income or expenditures. They’re auditing the admissions statistics.

Texas Christian’s dean of admissions says it is the nation’s only university to voluntarily have its admissions data — the number of applicants and their SAT scores, class rank, grade-point averages, and other measures — audited for accuracy. It has done so for the last dozen years -- and not just for show.

As consumers and the federal government push for greater transparency about such things as cost, average debt, and job-placement rates, major universities have been caught misrepresenting those and other numbers to improve the way they look to prospective students.

“We on the inside have a pretty good idea of who is reporting accurately and who is not. And quite a few schools appear to be cooking the books,” said Texas Christian Dean of Admission Raymond Brown.

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That dirty little secret has started to slip out as competition intensifies to attract top students and scale the all-important college rankings. In an admissions battleground on which universities grapple for any advantage, rising by just one number in the U.S. News & World Report rankings leads to a nearly 1 percent increase in applications, a 2011 study at the Harvard Business School found.

Falsified data

In the past year alone, six top colleges and universities have admitted falsifying information sent to the U.S. Department of Education, their own accrediting agencies, and U.S. News, whose college rankings remain the nation’s most prominent. Another was caught the year before. For many of the schools, the misrepresentations had gone on for years.

A senior administrator at Claremont McKenna College resigned after admitting that he falsified admissions test scores submitted to U.S. News and the U.S. Department of Education. For years Bucknell inflated the mean SAT scores of entering students by an average of 16 points, the university’s president has admitted. Tulane’s business school gave U.S. News false data about its number of applicants and inflated their average scores on admissions tests by 35 points.

Emory University misreported student data to U.S. News and other organizations that rank universities and colleges, school officials said, providing the much-higher SAT averages of students who applied and were admitted, rather than those who enrolled. It also inflated entering students’ class ranks. Two former admissions deans and other administrators were aware of the practice, according to the university.

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College students face another round of sticker shock

George Washington University overstated the proportion of its entering freshmen who were in the top 10 percent of their high school classes. And the law school at the University of Illinois was caught providing inaccurate admissions information to the American Bar Association, or ABA, which accredits law schools; the same thing happened in 2011 at the Villanova University School of Law.

Illinois’s law school was publicly censured and fined $250,000 by the ABA, and Villanova’s was placed on probation for two years.  Meanwhile, 15 other law schools have faced lawsuits for fraud, unfair competition, and false advertising for allegedly misreporting graduates’ job-placement rates by including part-time and temporary work and employment unrelated to law.

“These educational institutions have lost the benefit of the doubt, and I think that’s sad,” says Kyle McEntee, co-founder and director of Law School Transparency, which pushes law schools to provide accurate admissions and job-placement statistics.

Legal groups intervene

So wide has the credibility gap become for law schools that the ABA and the Law School Admission Council responded this year by stepping in to check and certify law schools’ reported entrance-test scores and undergraduate grade-point averages.

But students and their families applying to other kinds of colleges and universities will have to rely on internal whistle-blowers, who exposed all the other instances of falsifications over the last year. Except at Texas Christian, and, now law schools, admissions statistics are not independently audited or certified. And besides bad publicity, the only penalty has been that schools discovered by U.S. News to have misreported data are “unranked” until the accuracy of their information can be confirmed in the following year.

Now the federal government has unveiled a new college-selection tool for families called the College Scorecard, lauded by President Barack Obama in his State of the Union address last month and launched the next day, which streamlines and expands information about cost, graduation rates, average debt of graduates, and loan-default rates in a centralized, searchable government website. In spite of its government cachet, that information, too, is provided directly by universities and colleges themselves, and is not certified or audited, and there’s no penalty for misreporting it, said Daren Briscoe, spokesman for the Education Department.

“It is a voluntary reporting system, and like most voluntary reporting systems, it’s not penalty-driven,” said Briscoe, who adds that because the College Scorecard doesn’t rank competing schools, they shouldn’t have any incentive to fudge the numbers.

“I suppose if you’re super cynical you can think that a school might be nefarious enough to pump up their data,” he said. “We’re not taking a position that this is a perfect system. There are always opportunities for us to look at how things are working or not.”

Even if universities and colleges do correctly report the average loan debt of their students, there’s already a loophole in the College Scorecard they can take advantage of, university administrators say privately: It doesn’t require them to disclose the average debt of parents who also borrow to help their children pay tuition.

A loss of 'reverence'

The bottom line is that students and their parents should resist the inclination to blindly believe information provided by even well-regarded universities and colleges, said Jane Shaw, president of the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy.
“We do tend to revere professors and we revere the institutions where they teach, and I think that reverence is probably changing,” Shaw said.

A spinoff of the private education company Hobsons cashes in on this growing mistrust by providing an alternative to college and university admissions statistics. Called Naviance, it collects information from high schools about the qualifications of students admitted to particular colleges, allowing other applicants to measure themselves against those standards rather than relying on the data that admissions offices provide.

While Brown concedes that the number of universities and colleges caught misreporting data remains a tiny fraction of the total, he says the problem is considerably more widespread than that.

“This is illustrative of a broader issue, which is the pressure that is on these admissions offices,” he said. “People talk about how college football coaches are under the gun constantly. They’re under no more pressure than an admissions officer.”

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education-news outlet based at Teachers College, Columbia University.

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It's a club where you might, in fact, use a club: Harvard University has joined the small but growing roster of U.S. colleges that have approved official student organizations devoted to kinky sex.

Harvard administrators were to formally approve the group, Harvard College Munch, on Friday, The Harvard Crimson reported. The recognition means the group, which has grown to 30 members since its informal founding earlier this year, can officially meet on campus to discuss issues related to the bondage-discipline, dominant-submission, and sadism-masochism communities, known collectively as BDSM.

More important, its founder told the newspaper, speaking under the pseudonym "Michael," is that the move bestows "the fact of legitimacy."

While Harvard's club drew widespread attention this week, it's far from the only BDSM club officially recognized by, or at least tolerated at, U.S. colleges.

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At the University of Minnesota, Kinky U is Student Organization No. 2370. It meets weekly — after office hours "for maximum safety and confidentiality" — to discuss "topics related to kink and the kinky community."

At Tufts University in Medford, Mass., Tufts Kink started meeting this semester.

"I think there’s a number of students who feel sort of isolated and alienated, and I think it's very powerful for them to have just a place where they can express themselves and a place where they can make friends," co-founder Anschel Schaffer-Cohen told The Tufts Daily.

There's no national registry of campus BDSM groups, but consensus is that the oldest is at Columbia University, in New York, where Conversio Virium meets on campus every Monday night at 9.

"Conversio virium" is Latin for "conversion of forces," and the group says it dedicates itself to 'the full exploration of BDSM, both in its sexual and spiritual aspects."

"We encourage acceptance and communication between members," its charter says. "We urge them to learn from each other's play styles and experiences and to set aside any assumptions they may have about who people are and what they do." 

Actual sex isn't allowed at such on-campus gatherings, which usually host discussions or the occasional live demonstration of safe and consensual kinky sex.

The point is to "raise general awareness of kink and to promote acceptance and understanding of BDSM," according to the bylaws of Risk-Aware Consensual Kink, or RACK, at the University of Chicago.

RACK is an intellectual group, it says, not a play group. It provides "resources to students who are interested in or curious about BDSM" and demonstrations that "give students an opportunity to learn from experienced members of the BDSM community about safely practicing kink."

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College is outrageously expensive. Four years at an elite, private school like the University of Chicago (#4) or Stanford (#3) costs more than a quarter of a million dollars. A degree from a more affordable state school, like the College of William & Mary (#40) or the University of California, Berkeley (#50), still costs around $100,000, even for “in-state” students, who pay less in tuition.

Is it worth it? For many students, the answer is probably not – unless they are accomplished enough to be accepted by one of the schools ranked near the top of our annual list of America’s 650 Top Colleges.

The rankings, which are compiled exclusively for Forbes by the Washington, D.C.-based Center for College Affordability and Productivity, focus on the things that matter the most to students: quality of teaching, great career prospects, high graduation rates and low levels of debt. They do not attempt to assess a school’s reputation, nor are they a measure of academic selectivity and we pointedly ignore any metrics that would encourage schools to engage in wasteful spending.

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Forbes' full list of America’s top colleges 

Princeton University (#1) tops the list again, for the first time since 2008. Williams College (#2) slips into second place, after two consecutive years as top dog. Ivy League schools dominate the top ten, claiming three spots in addition to Princeton: Yale (#5), Harvard (#6) and Columbia (#8); Cornell (#51) was the only Ivy not to crack the elite top 50.

Rounding out the top ten are the University of Chicago (#4), a place where undergraduates say “fun comes to die,”  West Point (#7), whose cadets pay no tuition, although they must serve on active duty in the U.S. Army post-graduation, Pomona College (#9), one of the seven Claremont Colleges in Southern California and Swarthmore (#10). Excluding service academies, there are five public schools in the top 50, with the University of Virginia (#36) being the highest ranked.

The rankings are based on five general categories: post graduate success (32.5%), which evaluates alumni pay and prominence, student satisfaction (27.5%), which includes professor evaluations and freshman to sophomore year retention rates, debt (17.5%), which penalizes schools for high student debt loads and default rates, four-year graduation rate (11.25%) and competitive awards (11.25%), which rewards schools whose students win prestigious scholarships and fellowships like the Rhodes, the Marshall and the Fulbright or go on to earn a Ph.D.  The complete methodology is available here.

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• America’s Top 100 Colleges 2012
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• The Best Public Colleges
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As an undergraduate at the University of California–Irvine, Christopher Campbell was almost forced to drop out by repeated double-digit increases in tuition — some in the middle of the academic year — to compensate for massive state budget cuts.

Campbell ultimately made it through and is starting law school at UCI this fall. But he watched classmates driven out of college by the unpredictable mid-year price hikes.

Now he’s pushing an amendment to the California constitution that would ban public universities from raising tuition for students after they’ve enrolled.

“Students and families are fed up,” Campbell says. “And that’s only going to get worse. As more and more students have to deal with these problems, it’s just going to keep building until the problem is fixed.”

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After three decades of tuition hikes that have outpaced inflation and increases in family income, students, families, legislators and governing boards are demanding a halt.

“Enough is enough,” says Anne Mariucci, a member of the Arizona Board of Regents, which for the first time in 20 years has frozen in-state tuition at the University of Arizona and Arizona State University after increases over the last five years of 84 and 96 percent, respectively.

Some private universities, too, have agreed to stop raising their tuition, or even cut it, after being alarmed to discover their enrollments starting to slip.

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“The pushback is beginning,” says John McCardell Jr., president of the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn., which last year cut tuition 10 percent and this year is promising to keep the cost unchanged for entering freshmen for four years.

Sewanee, as the university is known, was losing students to the University of Tennessee, the University of Georgia and other cheaper public institutions, McCardell says, and the size of the entering class was beginning to slide.

“Price probably has more than nothing to do with that,” he says. Students and their families “are voting with their feet.”

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Or with their votes. The Arizona regents were reportedly being pressed to get a handle on tuition by the governor and legislators. They, in turn, were hearing from increasingly angry constituents. “About time,” read the headline on an editorial in the ASU State Press, the student newspaper, when the tuition freeze was finally proposed. “As prices continue to go up, you have people saying, you can’t keep doing that,” says Rick Myers, chairman of the Arizona Board of Regents.

The 10-campus University of California system also froze undergraduate tuition for this fall after the governor and legislature there made doing so a condition of a $125 million budget increase — though there’s a hitch: Tuition will increase more than 20 percent in the middle of the year if voters fail to approve a tax increase in November to raise $8.5 billion for public education and other services, a quid pro quo that some critics say is blackmail.

Texas legislators have long pushed for a tuition freeze at that state’s public universities. When Gov. Rick Perry added his voice to the chorus this year, his appointees on the board of regents agreed — over university officials’ objections — to forgo a planned 5 percent increase over two years at the flagship University of Texas–Austin, where tuition now will be unchanged. Tuition also will be frozen at the Arlington campus. “It isn’t in the interest of most Texans for universities to be continually raising their tuition rates,” Perry was quoted as saying.

Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick also announced that he opposed a 5 percent tuition increase at University of Massachusetts campuses, though the system’s board of trustees imposed it anyway.

The only exception is the University of Massachusetts School of Law, which will hold tuition level. So will the law schools at the University of New Hampshire. Last year, the University of Maryland's Francis King Carey School of Law froze its tuition. Not coincidentally, the number of law-school applicants plummeted by more than 15 percent for the academic year that begins this fall — on top of declines of 10 percent in each of the previous two years — according to the Law School Admission Council. The number of students taking the Law School Admission Test this year suggests the trend will continue. Meanwhile, one third of law-school graduates in 2010 did not have jobs nine months later, and starting pay for those who did was down 13 percent. Phoebe Haddon, dean of the University of Maryland’s law school, cited “the impact of the economic downturn on the legal employment market” as one of her reasons for freezing tuition.

Equating price with prestige
Colleges and universities have long been reluctant to lower or cap their prices, McCardell says, because — as with new cars and fine wines — they believe students and their families equate price with prestige. That, he says, is why elite private colleges all magically end up within a few hundred dollars of one another each year.

In his 25 years as a higher-education administrator, “I was reared to believe that what you charge is a reflection of your position in the marketplace,” McCardell says. “And I was reared to believe that no matter what happens, the American people will pay the sticker price. But all that changed fundamentally in 2008,” at the start of the economic downturn.

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Supply and demand have not traditionally affected the price of higher education. That’s because supply largely remained unchanged, while demand was ever-rising. But the number of high-school graduates, which peaked in 2009, is starting to decline. Enrollment fell at more than 40 percent of colleges and universities last year, according to the credit-rating firm Moody’s. At least 375 institutions still had space available for this fall when the admissions period was over, the largest number in a decade, the National Association for College Admission Counseling reports. The percentage of accepted students who actually enroll is also falling. A recent analysis of public and private nonprofit colleges by Bain & Company found that one third were on an “unsustainable financial path.”

Colleges that are especially feeling the squeeze are those with small enrollments and endowments — and those are also the kinds of private colleges and universities that are maintaining their tuition levels to remain competitive.

Private Oklahoma City University, for instance, competes with more than 25 public institutions — most of them cheaper — in a state of fewer than four million. “Access to higher education is broad here,” says Susan Barber, provost at the university, which froze tuition this year. “We had discussions that we hoped this would help retention of students and in our recruitment efforts. It wasn’t completely an altruistic decision.”

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Other schools that have frozen their tuition this fall include Burlington College in Vermont, which has about 200 undergraduates; Ancilla College, a Catholic, two-year liberal-arts college in Indiana with about 530 students; the 730-student Tabor College, a Mennonite school in Kansas; liberal-arts Urbana University in Ohio, which has 1,270 students; Franklin Pierce University in New Hampshire, which has 1,300 undergraduates; and Pacific Union College, a Seventh-Day Adventist college in California with an enrollment of 1,530.

“The question is, how much can you charge for your product? And that is a reflection of the laws of supply and demand and your sense of your own position in the marketplace,” McCardell says. “Why are people shopping at Costco and Sam’s Club? That’s a terrible analogy, but I can get a really good box of cherries at Costco for a whole lot less than I can get them at the Piggly Wiggly.”

Slashing prices
This fall, a few private colleges and universities — trying to compete with cheaper public institutions — are offering Costco-style markdowns. In New Jersey, for instance, private Seton Hall is matching the price of public Rutgers University for freshmen with top grades and SAT scores. That comes to about a 60 percent discount. Cabrini College, near Philadelphia, cut its tuition 12.5 percent and promised not to raise it above $30,000 through at least 2015.

Lincoln College, a private two-year college in Illinois, lowered its tuition 24 percent and the University of Charleston in West Virginia 22 percent, both in response to declining enrollments. William Peace University, a women’s college with 700 students in North Carolina, slashed tuition nearly 8 percent to attract men as it becomes co-educational, and to increase its enrollment by 50 percent. And Duquesne University, in Pittsburgh, is responding to a big drop in applications to its school of education by giving 50 percent discounts to incoming freshmen.

If students and their families are straying from expensive institutions, a few schools that are freezing or reducing what they charge seem to be winning them back. At Sewanee, applications have risen 17 percent, and the number of entering freshmen is up more than 12 percent. Oklahoma City University has 30 more freshmen enrolled this fall than last, and the number of students dropping out is down.

Back in California, Christopher Campbell is juggling law school and his referendum campaign to keep tuition flat for students who enroll at the state’s public universities.

“Whoever I tell,” he says, “is always, ‘Yeah, hey, let’s put this through.’ ”

This story, "Colleges freeze, reduce tuition as public balks at further price hikes," was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education-news outlet based at Teachers College, Columbia University.

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Federal regulations meant to ensure that students at for-profit colleges don't come out of school crushed by debt and unable to find a job seem to still be taking a toll on the industry, financial analysts said.

Several for-profit college chains reported this week that their enrollments had dropped in the latest fiscal quarter, though not as much as in the previous quarter.

DeVry Inc. reported late Monday that enrollment at DeVry University was expected to drop up to 17 percent in the summer term from last summer's number. But that was an improvement from the spring term, when enrollment declined nearly 20 percent from the previous year period, the company said in a news release.

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Investigation reveals claims of unmanageable debt by 'for-profit' college students

DeVry also said enrollment at its Carrington Colleges Group was expected to have declined 19 to 21 percent the quarter ending June 30. The group saw a plunge of nearly 31 percent in the previous quarter. 

And on Tuesday, Capella Education Co. said its total enrollment decreased 4.6 percent in the quarter ending June 30 and its new enrollment decreased 6 percent.

Morningstar Inc. senior analyst Peter Wahlstrom told the Chicago Sun-Times that prospective students are wondering “Can I get a job? Is that degree worth anything. There’s just a lot of questions that were raised.”

Read the Department of Education rules

As The Associated Press noted this week in a story about the industry's problems, the recession brought a big jump in enrollment. The U.S. Department of Education issued the tougher rules in June 2011 in response to what it called "widespread evidence of waste, fraud and abuse" in the industry.

The Education Department said last year that:

• 92 percent of students at for-profit institutions borrow to finance their tuition, compared to 59 percent at four-year, private, non-profit schools and 46 percent at four-year public schools.
• The proportion of those loans that are federally issued or federally guaranteed is approaching 90 percent, representing $18 billion a year.
• Students at for-profit colleges are nearly twice as likely to be unemployed upon graduation as graduates of other types of schools.
• Students at for-profit colleges make up about 12 percent of all U.S. college students but represent 46 percent of all student loans in default.

The status of the federal rules has been muddled by a federal judge's ruling last last month overturning a key component. The rules, which had been set to take effect July 1, required that for programs to keep their federal student aid, at least 35 percent of graduates must be repaying their loans. But Judge Rudolph Contreras of Federal District Court in Washington said in a ruling released June 30 that the benchmark was set too arbitrarily. The Education Department is reexamining the benchmark.

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If you think privacy settings on your Facebook and Twitter accounts guarantee future employers or schools can't see your private posts, guess again.

Employers and colleges find the treasure-trove of personal information hiding behind password-protected accounts and privacy walls just too tempting, and some are demanding full access from job applicants and student athletes.

In Maryland, job seekers applying to the state's Department of Corrections have been asked during interviews to log into their accounts and let an interviewer watch while the potential employee clicks through wall posts, friends, photos and anything else that might be found behind the privacy wall.

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Previously, applicants were asked to surrender their user name and password, but a complaint from the ACLU stopped that practice last year. While submitting to a Facebook review is voluntary, virtually all applicants agree to it out of a desire to score well in the interview, according Maryland ACLU legislative director Melissa Coretz Goemann.

Student-athletes in colleges around the country also are finding out they can no longer maintain privacy in Facebook communications because schools are requiring them to "friend" a coach or compliance officer, giving that person access to their “friends-only” posts. Schools are also turning to social media monitoring companies with names like UDilligence and Varsity Monitor for software packages that automate the task. The programs offer a "reputation scoreboard" to coaches and send "threat level" warnings about individual athletes to compliance officers.

A recent revision in the handbook at the University of North Carolina is typical:

"Each team must identify at least one coach or administrator who is responsible for having access to and regularly monitoring the content of team members’ social networking sites and postings,” it reads. "The athletics department also reserves the right to have other staff members monitor athletes’ posts."

All this scrutiny is too much for Bradley Shear, a Washington D.C.-lawyer who says both schools and employers are violating the First Amendment with demands for access to otherwise private social media content.

"I can't believe some people think it's OK to do this,” he said. “Maybe it's OK if you live in a totalitarian regime, but we still have a Constitution to protect us. It's not a far leap from reading people's Facebook posts to reading their email. ... As a society, where are we going to draw the line?"

Aside from the free speech concerns, Shear also thinks colleges take on unnecessary liability when they aggressively monitor student posts.

"What if the University of Virginia had been monitoring accounts in the Yeardley Love case and missed signals that something was going to happen?” he said, referring to a notorious campus murder. “What about the liability the school might have?"

Shear has gotten the attention of Maryland state legislators, who have proposed two separate bills aimed at banning social media access by schools and potential employers. The ACLU is aggressively supporting the bills.

"This is an invasion of privacy. People have so much personal information on their pages now. A person can treat it almost like a diary," said Goemann, the Maryland ACLU legislative director. "And (interviewers and schools) are also invading other people's privacy. They get access to that individual’s posts and all their friends. There is a lot of private information there."

Maryland's Department of Corrections policy first came to light last year, when corrections officer Robert Collins complained to the ACLU that he was forced to surrender his Facebook user name and password during an interview. The state agency suspended the policy for 45 days, and eventually settled on the “shoulder-surfing” substitute.

"My fellow officers and I should not have to allow the government to view our personal Facebook posts  and those of our friends just to keep our jobs," Collins said to the ACLU at the time.

Agency spokesman Rick Binetti confirmed the new policy, but wouldn't comment on it or the proposed law which may ban it.

It's easy to see why an agency that hires prison guards would want to sneak a peek at potential employees’ private online lives. Goemann said that prisons are trying to avoid hiring guards with potential gang ties -- the agency told the ACLU it had reviewed 2,689 applicants via social media, and denied employment to seven because of items found on their pages.

"All seven of these individuals' social media applications contained pictures of them showing verified gang signs (signs commonly known to law enforcement which are utilized by gangs)," the Department of Corrections told the ACLU  in response to questions it asked about the program. It stressed the voluntary nature of social media inspection, noting that five of the 80 employees hired in the last three hiring cycles didn't provide access.

For student athletes, though, the access isn't voluntary. No access, no sports.

"They're saying to students if you want to play, you have to friend a coach. That's very troubling," said Shear, the D.C. lawyer.  "A good analogy for this, in the offline world, would it be acceptable for schools to require athletes to bug their off-campus apartments? Does a school have a right to know who all your friends are?"

There have been many high-profile embarrassing moments born of the toxic combination of student-athletes and Twitter. North Carolina defensive lineman Marvin Austin tweeted about expensive purchases on his account two years ago, then became subject of an NCAA investigation about improper conduct with a player agent. The incident led, in part, to the school's aforementioned aggressive social media policy.

So it’s not surprising that many schools want to keep a careful eye on what students are posting online.

But avoiding an uncomfortable moment is not a good enough reason to squash free speech, Spear says. Plenty of settled case law in the U.S. sides with students' rights to express themselves publicly, he said, including numerous cases involving student newspapers.  Public displays of protest are also protected: A landmark 1969 Supreme Court decisions known as Tinker vs. the Des Moines School District said school officials couldn't prevent students from wearing armbands protesting the Vietnam War as long as they weren't inciting violence.

Colleges have legitimate concerns about the things students post on social media accounts, but they should "deal with that issue the way they deal with everything else. They should educate," Shear said.

"Schools are in the business of educating, not spying," he added. "We don't hire private investigators to follow students wherever they go. If students say stupid things online, they should educate them ... not engage in prior restraint."

Goemann also noted that the rush to social media monitoring raises an often overlooked legal concern: It's against Facebook's Terms of Service.

"You will not share your password ... let anyone else access your account or do anything else that might jeopardize the security of your account," the site says in its policies. 

Frederic Wolens, a Facebook spokesman, wouldn't comment on the Maryland legislative proposals, but he said many of these school and employer policies appear to violate the site's terms.

"Under our terms, only the holder of the email address and password is considered the Facebook account owner. We also prohibit anyone from soliciting the login information or accessing an account belonging to someone else," he said in a statement to msnbc.com. Wolens said Facebook has yet to take a position on collegiate social media monitoring.

Social media monitoring on colleges, while spreading quickly among athletic departments, seems to be limited to athletes at the moment. There's nothing stopping schools from applying the same policies to other students, however.  And Shear says he's heard from college applicants that interviewers have requested Facebook or Twitter login information during in-person screenings.

The practice seems less common among employers, but scattered incidents are gaining attention from state lawmakers. The blog Tecca.com last year showed what it said was an image of an application for a clerical job with a North Carolina police department that included the following question:

"Do you have any web page accounts such as Facebook, Myspace, etc.?  If so, list your username and password." 

And the state of Illinois has followed Maryland's lead and is considering similar legislation to ban social media password demands by employers. 

But Shear says a patchwork of state laws isn't good enough when the stakes are this high.

"We need a federal law dealing with this," he said. "After 9/11, we have a culture where some people think it's OK for the government to be this involved in our lives, that it's OK to turn everything over to the government. But it's not. We still have privacy rights in this country, and we still have a Constitution."

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