College career centers are seeing big boosts in interactions between students and potential employers -- a development they credit to Handshake, a talent-recruitment start-up. But many students who have profiles on the platform say they don鈥檛 remember listing their grades or even signing up, and some privacy experts are raising questions about the site's terms of service.
Handshake was founded in 2014 by three engineering students at Michigan Technological University in an effort to give students access to a larger number of potential employers, no matter their location, head of business Jonathan Stull and co-founder Garrett Lord said in an interview.
Lord said he founded the company because of a problem many of his classmates at Michigan Tech faced: the university is located in the state鈥檚 Upper Peninsula, a quarter of a day鈥檚 drive from Minneapolis and Milwaukee. 鈥淎 lot of my smart, talented computer science friends didn鈥檛 have the opportunities that my West Coast, East Coast friends were having,鈥 he said.
For students, Handshake works a lot like LinkedIn, the professional networking site. Students can build profiles highlighting their academic accomplishments, skills and extracurricular activities, and then make those profiles visible to companies on Handshake that have connected with their university.
Inside Higher Ed on Monday morning activated an account and invited 10 universities to connect on Handshake. Within three hours, six universities approved the requests, granting a reporter access to more than 47,700 student profiles.
Many students appear to have spent time and effort fleshing out their profiles, adding head shots, student clubs, work experience and other pieces of information designed to market themselves to potential employers.
But many other students appear never to have touched their profiles. Those profiles contain only basic information such as major, year and intended graduation date, and, in the case of many universities, grade point average.
Some of those students, contacted by Inside Higher Ed, said they were not aware of Handshake.
鈥淚 do not remember even signing up for the service, let alone allowing it to list my GPA,鈥 a former student at the University of Rochester said in an email.
A student at Emory University said the same: 鈥淚 do not remember giving Handshake permission to list my GPA.鈥
A recent alumnus of Boston University added, 鈥淚 wouldn鈥檛 know how to take [the information] off, because I don鈥檛 remember signing up.鈥
Disclosing information about thousands of students鈥 grades without their written consent would be a violation of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. When reached for comment, however, the universities all said the same thing: at some point, the students gave Handshake permission to display that information.
"Based on the University of Rochester鈥檚 agreement with Handshake, a student鈥檚 information is only available to potential employers after the student signs up for the Handshake system," a spokesperson for the University of Rochester said in an email. "Once students join, they can customize the settings of their profile according to their privacy preferences. Without a University of Rochester student鈥檚 active permission, employers are not able to view that student鈥檚 details through Handshake, including his or her GPA."
Following the requests for comment, three of the universities revoked Inside Higher Ed鈥檚 access to student profiles.
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