<p>Received a letter today about this. DS was accepted at P for grad school. The letter lets us know that his complete file, with SS, DOB, CV, LORs, etc, is now open for anyone to see on the net. They offer info to check with credit card companies. I am quite upset, and checking credit card companies doesn’t seem enough.</p>
<p>My beef is why colleges don’t have better security for our kids personal info.</p>
<p>This is very upsetting. The same thing happened at Harvard a few years ago. SS#s and other info taken, although not the application files- just active student files. So they provided a year of free security service for all the students. After the fact, it’s a bit late.
Someone opened an account in her name using the SS# and we had to go through the whole deal to get it removed. </p>
<p>I agree with you that this is unacceptable. Why don’t they encrypt info like the SS#? I can’t believe that there isn’t software out there to handle this.</p>
<p>I agree. For cost of applications, and legal consequences, the Us should get serious about security.</p>
<p>What steps did you take?</p>
<p>Dd had to call the company that had the account and let them know what had happened. She also registered a credit freeze with the credit bureaus, which prohibits anyone from opening a new account in her name for a specific length of time (3 months, I think.) I would recommend your son do that asap.
Have him call Experion or one of the other 2 and get suggestions from them as to what is the best approach. And they’ll give you a credit report for free in this situation.<br>
I should warn you though, they are very difficult to deal with and will only talk to him–not parents.</p>
<p>This happened to S with Columbia. Several years after he had applied and been rejected, he got a letter stating that a laptop with his personal info. had been stolen. They too offered free credit monitoring. We were angry that they had kept his info on file that long, and suspected they were using it for other purposes. For example, DH kept getting MBA ads from them.</p>