Suppose you are a fifth-year mechanical-engineering student at Cleveland State University, paying your tuition by taking off an occasional semester to work.

Is that any business of the federal government?

An idea circulating in the U.S. Department of Education and on Capitol Hill says that maybe it should be, and that maybe the government should follow students' progress through college by assigning them bar codes.

Not surprisingly, that already is raising alarms. "What right does the government have to know that?" asks Katherine Haley Will, president of Gettysburg College in Gettysburg, Pa., an outspoken critic of student tracking.

But as the government becomes an ever-bigger player in financing higher education, others see it as an idea whose time is coming. Without better information on college students, "we're going to throw good money after bad," warns Travis Reindl, director of policy analysis of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, a trade group of 430 smaller public schools.

The idea of tracking students first surfaced last year as Congress began a regular review of the Higher Education Act which, among other things, will provide about $80 billion in grants and loans to college students this year. Lawmakers were frustrated that they didn't know such basic information as how many students graduate, how students receiving federal aid are faring or what they are studying.

At that, the education department began looking into a "unit record system" -- a database to track both public- and private-college students individually as they moved through school. In a report last month, the department suggested that the system track the number of courses each student enrolled in and completed each semester, major field of study, degrees, scholarships -- even if they are from a college alumni association and not Uncle Sam -- and such personal information as name, gender, race and social security number.

All this information would be updated three or four times a year, the study noted. Files would be kept indefinitely to track those returning to college, even into their 50s and 60s. And in order to make historical comparisons, records would need to go back at least six years, to include students as far back as 1999.

With that information, the department would know how many engineers are in the pipeline, for example -- a number potentially useful to employers and to those who set immigration policy. It would gain more knowledge about students who receive federal college grants, including how many graduate. The immigration status of foreign students would likely be noted, although not for such homeland-security purposes as finding students who overstay their visas.

Such a database would show how well each school does at graduating its students. As it is, colleges calculate their graduation rates by counting how many of their students who arrived as freshmen graduate within six years. If a student transfers from, say, Cleveland State to Ohio State, or takes seven years to get a degree, that student isn't included in the graduation statistics of either school.

Further, the system could calculate the real price of tuition at every school -- what a low-income Hispanic woman could expect to pay to attend, say, Oberlin College, in Oberlin, Ohio. Student aid significantly cuts the price that colleges advertise, but currently, the government knows only the average price that the average student pays at any college. Policy makers worry that low-income and minority students are being scared off by steep sticker prices.

"The education pipeline is bleeding" students as they drop out of college or take years to finish degrees, says Mr. Reindl of the state colleges association. "In order to fix it, we need these numbers to know where it's failing."

The department's study points out that the government already requires colleges to forward vast amounts of information, although none of it tracks individual students or includes their names and social security numbers. Using data that Gettysburg already supplies to the education department, for example, the department's Web site reports that the school awarded 49 history degrees last year, that it gave grants averaging $16,413 to 64 percent of its freshmen and that 44 percent of the men who applied were admitted, among hundreds of other details.

Additionally, 39 states have unit-record tracking systems for their college students -- although they aren't linked to a central database. Six of those, including Texas, even track private-college students.

Grover Whitehurst, the education department's chief adviser on research and evaluation, says the Bush administration hasn't decided whether it will push for a unit-record system and adds that the department needs approval and money from Congress before it could go ahead. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings and Capitol Hill staffers to whom he has shown the study are "interested," Mr. Whitehurst says. But "a large number of people have very real concerns," he adds.

The loudest concern is about privacy. "Do we want to make the purchase of education federally reportable?" asks Barmak Nassirian of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, a trade group.

Gettysburg's Dr. Will raises the specter of the government using the data to mandate graduation rates or other standards, or to pressure schools over the political views of their professors. "They're looking to oversee higher education in ways that have never been done before," she warns.

But others see those concerns as overblown. "Congress could go into the IRS database and get richer information than whether someone took bio-chem," says Mr. Reindl of the state colleges association. "It's not interested in who passed algebra."

Education groups have given it a mixed review. Those representing students and private colleges oppose it. Groups representing community colleges and research universities initially endorsed it, but then withdrew support. "We heard from a lot of presidents about privacy," says David Baime, government-relations director of the American Association of Community Colleges.

To calm the privacy concerns, the education department's Mr. Whitehurst says students could be assigned a 14-digit bar code that enables the government to collect the same enrollment and financial-aid data without recording names and other identifying information.

Even that may not please many colleges. A tracking system, even with identifying details obscured, is "unwise in its formulation and impractical in its application," says Mark Emmert, president of the University of Washington in Seattle. If his school updated records on its 43,000 students three times a year, it would produce 129,000 records yearly -- plus thousands more for summer school.

If the idea isn't popular, it isn't dead either. The massive federal budget deficit means the Bush Administration has little money to expand popular college-aid programs, even though public-college tuition is up 23 percent in two years. Instead, the administration wants colleges to use federal student-aid money more wisely by moving students through school in four years and cutting dropout rates. That, President Bush regularly says, would free up money for more students.

"Something like this is going to happen because of the accountability movement. There will be some mandatory system of tracking students," the community college association's Mr. Baime predicts.