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.
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.