At the second public meeting held March 6 to update the college community on issues revolving around the stolen laptop computer, President Stephen Jordan announced that, while there is no new information regarding the police investigation, the College is making some headway in addressing internal policies.

First off, Jordan said that he has mandated that all College reports or studies that access private student information, including social security numbers, must now be approved through his office.

In addition, all College-owned laptops are to be turned into the Information Technology division for review of the data contained on their hard drives.

Interim Vice President of Information Technology George Middlemist explained that IT will be running software on all the laptops—which at latest count totals more than 350—to determine if any have unencrypted personal student information saved on the hard drives.

“We want to ensure that no other files of this type are compromised,” Jordan said.

Since publicly announcing the stolen laptop on Thursday, March 2, college officials have learned that the data was being used to determine unduplicated headcount in online courses over a ten-year period. “That is why the data starts with the 1996 fall semester, to coincide with the first online course offered by Metro State,” he said. The study of the ten-year trend in online versus classroom enrollment was conceived as a joint project for use in the Title III grant application and in the employee’s master’s thesis.

Jordan reiterated that no personnel data of any student was included in either the grant proposal or thesis. When asked, he stated that the College will be posting the grant application online for students to see, as well as look into whether the thesis, which was written for a master’s program at the University of Colorado at Denver, could also be downloaded onto Metro State’s Web site.

In addition, it has been determined that the stolen database contained dates of birth, addresses and student ID numbers as well as their names and social security numbers.

No evidence of identity theft has been reported to the College. “It’s not highly probable that the data will be used for this purpose, however, it’s clearly possible,” Jordan said.