Sharing student information (SSI) is a major task in the higher education system. SSI, which is essential for providing fine-grained information, can facilitate many academic services. Throughout the sharing process, student information must be protected, hence developing a promising secure and privacy-preserving framework for SSI in higher education systems is a significant task. Here, a secure and privacy-preserving sharing (SPPS) scheme is first introduced. Further, as a development of the SPPS scheme, an efficient and secure consent-based access control (ESCAC) protocol for SSI in higher education systems, which fulfills security and privacy preservation for information sharing, is proposed. In this context, consent is understood as an authorization agreement made between a student and an information requester. Having obtained student consent, an intended organization then gains access to the required information, which is encrypted before release by an academic information provider. Unauthorized access to the information is prevented by employing a conditional proxy re-encryption technique. Furthermore, the proposed ESCAC mechanism achieves mutual authentication, contextual privacy and collusion resistance. A guarantee of high computational efficiency, security and privacy is assured through a security analysis and performance evaluation.