To friend or not to friend? College admissions in the age of Facebook
To friend or not to friend? College admissions in the age of Facebook
By Lindsey Anderson, USA TODAY
Facebook isn't just for socializing anymore — a new survey of college admissions officials suggests students are increasingly taking care of business on the site as well. More than 70% of officials in the annual survey say they or others in their office have received Facebook or MySpace "friend requests" from applicants.
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While officials aren't sure how students think it will help their chances of getting into college, "What's becoming clear is that applicants themselves are using Facebook as an essential communication medium and are expecting to use it as a medium with schools," says Jeff Olson, executive director of research for Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions, which has conducted the survey for the last six years. This year was the first year Kaplan asked officials about friend requests.
While 86% of college students have a Facebook account, according to a 2008 survey by Harvard University's Institute of Politics, only 13% of the 401 admissions officials surveyed this year say their schools have a policy about interacting with students on social networking sites, Olson says. "That's the picture of the changing landscape that we are in right now."
How colleges can employ social networking sites and the possible conflicts that can arise from their use are hot topics among admissions officials, says David Hawkins, director of public policy and research for the National Association for College Admission Counseling.
"I think that the general consensus among administrative offices … is that personal connections through social networking sites probably raises more potential problems that it solves," Hawkins says.
Many colleges are nervous about ethical and legal considerations, and are hesitant to cross students' personal space, says Nora Barnes, director of the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth. "There is no clear legal ground that covers social media, so academics as well as business people are hesitant about how they use the information they find online," she says.
To maintain a professional relationship with students, accepting friend requests is not advisable, says Mallory Wood, an admissions officer at St. Michael's College in Vermont. Her few student Facebook friends are ones she strongly connected with multiple times on college tours. Since her Facebook account is for personal and not professional use, the students have limited access to her profile.
"People use Facebook personally and professionally, and I just don't feel that prospective students would necessarily understand that there is that difference," Wood says.
"I think prospective students are much more interested in the life of a current student at Saint Michael's College, than the life of their admission counselor," she adds.
Jeannine Lalonde, senior assistant dean of admission at the University of Virginia, accepts friend requests from students since her university blog and Twitter accounts are linked to her Facebook posts. All three are professional pages that focus on the university. By being friends with students, she can answer common questions students ask on Facebook, she says.
But not all students are clamoring to connect with admissions officials: friending an admission official never even occurred to her, says Alex Ward, a sophomore at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
"Even if the opportunity to friend a college official had come up, I wouldn't have — it is inappropriate," Ward says. "While I don't think there is anything on my Facebook (page) that could hurt or help my chances of being admitted to a university, I don't know how someone else might interpret the information and I wouldn't want to take an unnecessary risk."
Out of the 401 schools surveyed by Kaplan, just 9% say their staffs have looked at students' social networking pages to help evaluate applicants. Of those, 33% say viewing applicants' pages negatively impacted their evaluation and 31% say it positively impacted their evaluation.
Alejandro Sosa, a sophomore at American University in Washington, D.C., compares friending an admission officer to friending a boss.
"It's a professional setting so anything inappropriate on my site would reflect negatively on me, and I don't think that that is a risk I would like to take," he says.
The Kaplan study surveyed by phone 401 admission officials from U.S. News & World Report "America's Best Colleges" and Barron's "Profiles of American Colleges."