College Admissions Offices Using Facebook
A recent study indicates that 21 percent of college admissions offices admit to searching social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace as part of the process of deciding whether to admit a potential student. I suspect that the real percentage is actually much higher.
My conversations with employers and other career professionals indicate that about five to 10 percent of employers admit to searching the social networking sites as part of their background checking process yet when you ask if they use the Internet for the checks at least 75 percent say yes and then explain they run the candidate's name through Google. Well, then that means that they're also checking the vast majority of social networking sites.MySpace, for example, defaults so that pages are not password protected and therefore when an employer searches Google they're also searching MySpace. Facebook is the opposite in that pages are by default not accessible to search engines.
So if a large majority of employers are searching MySpace and many other social networking sites and either ignorant or lying about it, then wouldn't it stand to reason that college admissions officials are similar? And if 21 percent of them admit to searching the social network sites versus 10 percent of employers, it stands to reason that far more than 75 percent of colleges are searching the social networking sites.
High school students and college students who want to transfer need to understand that whatever they post on-line is there forever and they should consider it to be visible by anyone at anytime. Posting information on-line is like getting a tattoo: you may be able to remove it but it is far more likely that at best you'll only be able to obscure it and it may be plainly visible for all to see forever. Don't post anything on-line that you don't want your favorite grandmother to see.
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