Policies
Privacy and student records
This policy states what personal information eLadder University holds about students and applicants, why, who it is shared with, and what rights a student has over their own record.
Draft in progress
We are finalising this policy.
Read it and tell us what to sharpen. Where a figure is still being set, we name the decision rather than publish a number we would have to change.
A note on FERPA
The site review asked for a "Privacy and FERPA" policy, following the naming used by established US institutions. FERPA — the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act — binds institutions that receive funding from the US Department of Education, and that turns on eLadder's authorisation and accreditation status.
This draft therefore commits eLadder to the substance of those rights — access to your own record, correction of what is wrong in it, and control over disclosure — as an institutional undertaking, and does not assert a legal status the university has not yet established. Claiming FERPA coverage before it applies would be read by an applicant as evidence of accreditation.
Being finalised in this section
- Whether FERPA applies to eLadder, confirmed in writing. Until it is, this policy states rights the university grants, not rights a statute compels — and the wording must not blur the two.
What we hold
- Identity and contact details: name, date of birth, address, email, telephone, country of residence.
- Application information: prior qualifications, transcripts, English language evidence, and the documents supplied to support them.
- Academic record: enrolment, courses taken, submitted work, marks, progression and award.
- Financial record: what was invoiced, what was paid, and by what method. We do not store full card numbers; payments are processed by our payment provider.
- Technical and usage information from the learning environment, including access times and submission timestamps, which are used to support students and to investigate academic integrity concerns.
Why we hold it
To assess an application, to enrol and teach a student, to assess their work and award their qualification, to keep the permanent academic record that makes a transcript possible years later, to bill and collect tuition, and to meet obligations placed on us by a regulator or by law.
Who it is shared with
We do not sell student information, and we do not pass it to advertisers.
- Staff and faculty of the university, where they need it to do their work.
- Service providers acting on our instructions — the learning platform, the payment processor, email delivery — bound to use it only for that purpose.
- A regulator, accreditor or auditor, where they are entitled to it.
- Anyone the student asks us to send it to, such as an employer or another institution verifying a qualification.
Being finalised in this section
- The named processors — learning platform, payment processor, email provider — and the countries their data is held in
Directory information
Some institutions publish limited information — that a person is enrolled, their programme, and any award — without asking each time. eLadder will not treat any student information as publishable by default until this list is settled and students have been told how to opt out of it.
Being finalised in this section
- Whether eLadder designates directory information at all, and if so exactly which fields and how a student opts out
Your rights over your own record
- To be told what we hold about you and to be given a copy.
- To have factual errors in your record corrected. A mark is not a factual error; disputing a mark is an academic appeal.
- To ask that we stop a particular disclosure, where we are not required to make it.
- To withdraw a consent you previously gave, without that affecting anything already done on it.
- To complain about how your information has been handled, under the grievance and complaints policy.
Being finalised in this section
- The email address a student uses to exercise these rights
- The number of days within which the university responds to such a request
How long we keep it
The academic record is kept permanently, because a transcript must remain available long after a student has left. Everything else is kept only as long as it is needed for the purpose it was collected for, or as long as a law or regulator requires.
Being finalised in this section
- The retention period for application records of applicants who did not enrol
- The retention period for financial records
Where information is held, and security
Access to student records is limited to those who need it, and access to the systems holding them requires individual accounts rather than shared ones.
eLadder teaches students in many countries, and information may therefore be processed outside the country a student lives in.
Being finalised in this section
- The countries student data is stored and processed in
- Whether eLadder is subject to GDPR or any other non-US data protection regime by virtue of teaching students resident there, confirmed in writing
Cookies and this website
This site uses only what is needed to serve the pages and to keep them working. Anything beyond that — analytics, or anything that follows a visitor to another site — will be listed here and consented to before it is set, not after.
Being finalised in this section
- Whether analytics is used on eladder.com, and which product
Changes to this policy
This policy is dated. Where it changes in a way that materially affects students, they will be told directly rather than through a silent update to this page.