"It has become an article of faith among many federal and especially state policy makers that the United States cannot possibly improve the performance of its higher education system without a significantly better way of collecting data about the performance of individual students and colleges," Inside Higher Ed reports. "Student aid legislation that the U.S. Senate could unveil as soon as this week would, like a comparable measure that the House of Representatives passed this month, give states significant financial incentives to develop such data systems. But the approach laid out in a draft section of the Senate legislation obtained by Inside Higher Ed would pursue the goal so broadly and aggressively -- by pushing states to collect an enormous array of information about individual students and link it to reams of other personal data -- that even some supporters of the need for data systems fear that it is politically impossible."