Understanding Privacy Laws that Obtain to Your Young Adult College Student
As your young adult heads off into college, it's imperative to know and understand as a parent how certain protections are in place for your child. Although you are their parent, if your college student is over 18 years old you no longer have legal authorization to educational or mental health records. Read below to understand how you can access these records.
The first law you need to be aware of is the Federal Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). This is the law that protects your student's educational records. Under FERPA, you will not have access to seeing your student's grades unless they specifically log into their student account and grant you access. FERPA also covers any university staff from confirming nor denying they are working with your student and whether or not they can speak to you about your student. Believe it or not, this also applies if your young adult is studying abroad. Certainly you are welcome to try to speak with anyone at any time about your young adult's educational records, but unless you are granted access, the information you receive from the University representative on the other end of the phone is going to be extremely limited.
The second law is the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA). This law protects the privacy of your young adult's medical and mental health records. Anyone that your student sees for medical or mental health reasons cannot speak with you about your child. That is, unless your child signs a HIPAA release specifically from the college's Counseling office. Even then, the Counselor or whoever your student is seeing will not necessarily share everything. When a student in crisis meets with a mental health professional, the professional can have the student sign a limited release under duress to speak with the parents. As a parent, if you are concerned about your student you can call the Counseling Office or any other office on campus to check in on your child. There is no law limiting you from expressing worry about your student's well-being!
As a parent of a college student it's important to know the difference between FERPA and HIPAA. It's also important to be proactive and have this paperwork signed rather before anything happens, rather than not have it and not be able to speak with anyone when your student is in trouble.
One step you can take in being proactive is creating an "Advanced Directive" with your young adult. Typically these are for young adults with significant mental health issues prior to enrolling in college, but realistically anyone can create one. The premise behind it is that if anything were to happen to your young adult, there is a team of professionals who get looped to ensure the best care for your young adult. This includes having someone designated as a decision-maker for anything related to the care of your young adult. Examples of who you may designate to be informed on the Advanced Directive could be family, Counselor, Advisor, Dean of Students, at-home Therapist, on-campus Case Manager, etc. A prime example of where this could apply is if your young adult ends up in a hospital with an accidental overdose, you along with the rest of the team will be informed of hospitalization, and subsequent discharge planning. If such a situation comes up and there is no Advanced Directive, unless your young adult tells you about the hospitalization the only way you'd find out is when you received a hospital bill.
Learning about these laws and hearing some scenarios can be rather alarming for some parents to hear. It's important to know ahead of time that unless your student grants you permission or creates an Advanced Directive, you may be truly in the dark about what's happening to your young adult child on campus. It's better to be prepared and not need to access any information, rather than to feel completely helpless if something comes up because your young adult is standing behind the gates of the privacy laws that guard higher education students.
For questions or comments contact Joanna.
