This doesn’t work, legally or practically speaking, because it’s trying to restrict speech-acts between parties that both want the information to be shared. You can’t legally stop people from truthfully disclosing that they have a reposessed degree, because of the first amendment. You can’t practically stop people from truthfully disclosing that they have a repossessed degree because they will have left many archived traces of that information, for example copies of their resume in the Internet Archive, they have an incentive to leave those traces in place, and removing those traces is too difficult and involves too many third parties to be a legal requirement.
On the other hand it would work in cases where a degree is necessary to licensure. For example, degree repossession would be effective against professions who need a degree as part of their certification to practice. If it is not the case already, this could be made the case for doctors, nurses, lawyers, accountants, professional engineers, etc. such that there would be real impacts of loss of degree even if you could still tell people you had it because you wouldn’t be allowed to practice your profession in the same capacity as before without your license.
(Whether or not licensing is a good policy is a separate question from the consideration of how the mechanism of degree repossession might work.)
You can’t legally stop people from truthfully disclosing that they have a repossessed degree, because of the first amendment.
The two of us could sign a contract where I pay you $100 and you agree not to disclose what you ate for breakfast this morning, and agree not to disclose the existence of the contract. That would be a reasonably standard non-disclosure agreement (NDA). Having a system where student loans normally survive bankruptcy, but can be discharged if you agree not to disclose that you ever had a degree seems similarly compatible with the first amendment?
left many archived traces of that information
In practice I think this is unlikely to matter much for most people. If you’re applying for a job, and the job asks for your resume, they’re not going to go poking around dusty corners of the web looking to see if you had some other version with different contents. Someone willing to put in that much additional effort would probably just spend it on evaluating the candidate directly.
The two of us could sign a contract where I pay you $100 and you agree not to disclose what you ate for breakfast this morning, and agree not to disclose the existence of the contract.
The relevant difference between this and an NDA is that this has the restriction on speech coming from a statute, rather than a contract between nongovernmental entities.
In practice I think this is unlikely to matter much for most people. If you’re applying for a job, and the job asks for your resume, they’re not going to go poking around dusty corners of the web looking to see if you had some other version with different contents.
Actually, I expect this will be discovered with nearly 100% reliability by ordinary due diligence on hires. Bankruptcies are necessarily very public and there are APIs for finding out whether someone has declared bankruptcy, so you just check whether each candidate has declared bankruptcy, and if so, you take the resume-URL they gave you and check that URL on archive.org just prior to their bankruptcy.
This doesn’t work, legally or practically speaking, because it’s trying to restrict speech-acts between parties that both want the information to be shared. You can’t legally stop people from truthfully disclosing that they have a reposessed degree, because of the first amendment. You can’t practically stop people from truthfully disclosing that they have a repossessed degree because they will have left many archived traces of that information, for example copies of their resume in the Internet Archive, they have an incentive to leave those traces in place, and removing those traces is too difficult and involves too many third parties to be a legal requirement.
On the other hand it would work in cases where a degree is necessary to licensure. For example, degree repossession would be effective against professions who need a degree as part of their certification to practice. If it is not the case already, this could be made the case for doctors, nurses, lawyers, accountants, professional engineers, etc. such that there would be real impacts of loss of degree even if you could still tell people you had it because you wouldn’t be allowed to practice your profession in the same capacity as before without your license.
(Whether or not licensing is a good policy is a separate question from the consideration of how the mechanism of degree repossession might work.)
The two of us could sign a contract where I pay you $100 and you agree not to disclose what you ate for breakfast this morning, and agree not to disclose the existence of the contract. That would be a reasonably standard non-disclosure agreement (NDA). Having a system where student loans normally survive bankruptcy, but can be discharged if you agree not to disclose that you ever had a degree seems similarly compatible with the first amendment?
In practice I think this is unlikely to matter much for most people. If you’re applying for a job, and the job asks for your resume, they’re not going to go poking around dusty corners of the web looking to see if you had some other version with different contents. Someone willing to put in that much additional effort would probably just spend it on evaluating the candidate directly.
The relevant difference between this and an NDA is that this has the restriction on speech coming from a statute, rather than a contract between nongovernmental entities.
Actually, I expect this will be discovered with nearly 100% reliability by ordinary due diligence on hires. Bankruptcies are necessarily very public and there are APIs for finding out whether someone has declared bankruptcy, so you just check whether each candidate has declared bankruptcy, and if so, you take the resume-URL they gave you and check that URL on archive.org just prior to their bankruptcy.