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Universities do a lot of financial interactions with students, including credit checks, housing, financial aid, and very high levels of payments. They also ofte

Universities do a lot of financial interactions with students, including credit checks, housing, financial aid, and very high levels of payments. They also often employ students. They also need to be able to track your records through name changes. They need your SSN.

DamnYuppie 6y ago
Not disagreeing with you points. My issue is, when I went to school, they wanted you to put your SS on your papers and tests as that is really what they used as your student id.
- driverdan 6y ago
  A law was passed about 15 years ago that prohibited using SSNs as student IDs.
  - officeplant 6y ago
    Now I feel ancient. If you ran our highschool ID cards through a magstripe reader it would display your SSN. There was a huge problem a few friends and I caused our first year there when we got bored in the computer lab. Every student account on a school computer had a folder named PUBLIC. Out of curiosity we dug down a few folders and found the txt file that was referenced by the simple visual basic program the IT guy wrote for class scheduling. That program used your name and SSN as login credentials. So there was a txt file that was simply a list of everyone's name and SSN for it to reference. We being the idiots we are copied the file because it was a public folder anyone could access. The only reason we didn't get expelled was because one of the kids had a lawyer father who threatened to go public about them being that irresponsible with our data.
    - driverdan 6y ago
      When I was in college SSNs were still used as our ID numbers. Every dept had folders in the hall outside the office for each student. They'd put grades out in those folders. Guess what was printed on those grades. If you had a mag stripe writer you could grab a random person's grades, encode their SSN on a student ID, and then use the card to buy stuff on campus.
- deleted 6y ago
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leephillips 6y ago
They need your SS# if they are paying you and need to withhold taxes. They don't need to do a credit check unless you are borrowing from them, which is unusual. For financial aid, if they want to verify your income, they can request that you have the IRS send them a transcript, which they will receive directly from the IRS with SS # redacted. The “need to be able to track your records through name changes” does not mean that they need your SS #. “They need your SSN”: Usually they do not, but US citizens have been trained to believe that they do. EDIT: It’s been a long time since I was in school, and, frankly, I was expecting someone with fresher knowledge to come up with a counter-example. So, see the comment above about an IRS form 1098-T.
DavidPeiffer 6y ago
>They need your SS# if they are paying you and need to withhold taxes. They also need it for the 1098-T (Tuition Statement). That's not to say they couldn't design better systems and not use SSN as an identifier, but there is a legitimate need for it.
- deleted 6y ago
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mdb333 6y ago
LOL not that long ago (late 90s early 00s in my case), student ID number WAS your SSN... [facepalm]

DamnYuppie 6y ago

Not disagreeing with you points. My issue is, when I went to school, they wanted you to put your SS on your papers and tests as that is really what they used as your student id.

driverdan 6y ago
A law was passed about 15 years ago that prohibited using SSNs as student IDs.
- officeplant 6y ago
  Now I feel ancient. If you ran our highschool ID cards through a magstripe reader it would display your SSN. There was a huge problem a few friends and I caused our first year there when we got bored in the computer lab. Every student account on a school computer had a folder named PUBLIC. Out of curiosity we dug down a few folders and found the txt file that was referenced by the simple visual basic program the IT guy wrote for class scheduling. That program used your name and SSN as login credentials. So there was a txt file that was simply a list of everyone's name and SSN for it to reference. We being the idiots we are copied the file because it was a public folder anyone could access. The only reason we didn't get expelled was because one of the kids had a lawyer father who threatened to go public about them being that irresponsible with our data.
  - driverdan 6y ago
    When I was in college SSNs were still used as our ID numbers. Every dept had folders in the hall outside the office for each student. They'd put grades out in those folders. Guess what was printed on those grades. If you had a mag stripe writer you could grab a random person's grades, encode their SSN on a student ID, and then use the card to buy stuff on campus.
deleted 6y ago
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leephillips 6y ago

They need your SS# if they are paying you and need to withhold taxes. They don't need to do a credit check unless you are borrowing from them, which is unusual. For financial aid, if they want to verify your income, they can request that you have the IRS send them a transcript, which they will receive directly from the IRS with SS # redacted. The “need to be able to track your records through name changes” does not mean that they need your SS #. “They need your SSN”: Usually they do not, but US citizens have been trained to believe that they do. EDIT: It’s been a long time since I was in school, and, frankly, I was expecting someone with fresher knowledge to come up with a counter-example. So, see the comment above about an IRS form 1098-T.

DavidPeiffer 6y ago

>They need your SS# if they are paying you and need to withhold taxes. They also need it for the 1098-T (Tuition Statement). That's not to say they couldn't design better systems and not use SSN as an identifier, but there is a legitimate need for it.

deleted 6y ago
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mdb333 6y ago

LOL not that long ago (late 90s early 00s in my case), student ID number WAS your SSN... [facepalm]