Why professors sometimes get this information (Score 1)

I'm on the faculty of another small liberal arts school. I don't know why SSNs were passed around in this case, but other sensitive information is routinely shared among "officers of the college" (faculty, administrators, academic staff) for some purposes. For example, when our school evaluates candidates for Phi Beta Kappa--which, incidentally, would be my guess for how this professor had the information at Miami--quite a lot of people need to see transcript information. We also produce an anonymized version of the information for student members of the chapter. We try to secure the information carefully--keeping electronic versions protected, shredding the paper. The Miami violation is clearly egregious. I mention our circumstances to explain why professors sometimes have access to this kind of information about students.