Report: 80% of College Admissions Departments Check Applicants’ Facebook Pages

If you’re a college senior currently applying to college and you “like” this post on Facebook, be warned: There’s a decent chance that the admissions departments at schools where you’re applying are keeping tabs. (Hopefully, they will note your excellent taste in blogs.) A recent Kaplan survey found that admissions departments at 80% of top colleges “visited potential students’ online profiles during their recruiting process.”

Allison Otis, who runs a blog about her experience interviewing applicants to Harvard, speculates on the real impact that indiscreet social media profiles can have on kids’ admission chances:

I doubt that hordes of students frequently lose scholarships or have an admission reneg’d for something that they innocently put up on Facebook. BUT what actually happens is much worse. Indiscreet social media postings can make your interviewer (or the admissions officer) prejudiced against you without realizing it. And that’s scary and worrisome because a large chunk of admissions decisions are really close calls. They are based on “fit” and “feel” – it’s not just what you’ve shown you can do, but the potential people think you have.

The obvious takeaway here, which applies to people of all ages: Keep personal Facebook pages pages private. Seriously.

(via AllFacebook)

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Robert Quigley