- Share This Post
- Pin It
- 3
- 2
-
Sparkle (0)
It’s been a very busy college admissions year in our household. I have a high school senior and a gap year kid, both applying to college, while I have been busily promoting my book about how to use social media to booster college admissions. To say that college admissions have taken the lion share of my attention here lately would be the understatement of the century…
Two years ago, as part of the research for my book, I asked a fair number of college admissions officers how they were using social media in their college admissions processes. And even though I got a mixed bag of responses, it was clear that social media had created a bit of a quandary for them. Social media offers these great online tools for reaching a target audience.
Facebook, the pre-eminent social media destination, is this perfect gathering place for college-bound students. In addition, the profile pages of this target audience represent a great deal of time spent setting forth who they are and how they want to be perceived. From an admissions assessment point of view, the opportunity on Facebook to learn about students is nearly ideal. For admissions personnel, at first, the problem with this new medium was that it was too uncharted and quickly-evolving to comfortably fit into the very deliberate admissions process. Colleges had to grapple with questions of privacy and expectation -- is it fair to judge a student based on information intended only for his or her friends? If an admissions officer “friends” a prospective student, is access to the officer’s private page appropriate? Is it hypocritical to be lurking around on someone else’s pages, but not grant access to your own? And is it fair to gauge how prepared a student is for college based on their casual and highly youth-oriented content and interaction?
These are not easy questions to answer. And as college admission folk began to engage in social media, as several admissions officers I spoke to confessed, some mistakes were made with over-access and awkward interaction, especially as the friend requests started pouring in from increasing numbers of ambitious students. (80% of college admissions personnel say they have received friend requests from prospective students.) Soon admissions offices found that they needed social media policy and rules about how to use it in an official capacity, and whether or not they should have private accounts. And even for the admissions offices that put policies in place, so much of what was to come could not be anticipated, which is often the case with new technologies.
Still many schools jumped in anyway, however cautiously. And it has paid off big time. The tactical and ethical dilemmas that plagued the use of social media for assessment purposes has eased a bit, with the dominance of one site -- Facebook; the development of Facebook groups and pages; and the installment of more-user friendly privacy settings. Colleges have been able to successfully use social media to connect with students and create up-to-the-minute two-directional information flows. Some colleges have been creative with the use of social media models on their own websites, where students can join college affiliated communities, share information about themselves and interact with staff and even current students. Look at how Stanford University and Dartmouth have utilized the Facebook Office Hour model, and how the University of Texas at Austin has provided a way for students to sign on to its website, get a UT identification number and share with admissions folk and students, even in real time. So far, for the most part, it’s been a win-win.
But these warm and fuzzy feelings between school and applicant about increased access and inexpensive ways of connecting is beginning to be eclipsed once again by the dark side of the social media paradigm. We’ve known for some time now that colleges look at the pages of applicants as part of the assessment process. My interviews uncovered a consistent and growing movement toward utilizing social media for this purpose among admissions officers. One veteran admissions officer I spoke to commented on the ease of having an applicant’s Facebook profile on his computer while his or her application is on his desk. And while most of the admissions officers said that they do not have the time or the inclination to look at the social media of every applicant, there
