From Press-citizen.com:
The Press-Citizen was one of several media outlets in August who made a public records request from the University of Iowa for the application records of James Holmes — the University of Colorado neuroscience student suspected of the July mass shooting in Aurora, Colo.
[…]
Over the years, the Press-Citizen has accused UI officials of invoking FERPA as a blanket protection from having to release any public documents they don’t want to release. And over the course of a 2008 lawsuit filed by the Press-Citizen against UI, it came out that UI officials, indeed, had claimed FERPA exemptions inappropriately for many documents related to a 2007 sexual assault on campus. But when it came to the requests for Holmes’s application, UI officials released the redacted documents and explained that FERPA only covers students who actually enroll in and attend classes at the university.