From the Raleigh News and Observer (12/4/10): When news broke that UNC football players might have accepted benefits from agents, we requested any campus parking tickets given to 11 players. We wanted to see what they were driving.
Municipal and state-university parking tickets generally are public record. You should be able to determine, for example, if someone has $8,000 in unpaid parking fines. That’s a crazy example – right? – but it could show that not all tickets were treated the same.
UNC declined to provide the players’ tickets, saying they are an educational record. (UNC also says each car was registered to the player, a parent or a fellow student.)
In declining our request, UNC became the latest university to deny records based on its interpretation of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, often called FERPA. That law was passed in 1974 to protect education records from public view.
Universities interpret FERPA differently.