News: Should you Friend?

In case you missed it, USA Today (I know, we're going highbrow... bear with me here) ran an interesting article on college admissions that looked at social networking--specifically, should you friend your college admissions officers on Facebook?

In a nutshell, no, you probably shouldn't. Like many non-traditional admissions gambits, it introduces a lot of new potential downsides for your application, and the benefits of doing so are pretty slim. After all, do you really think you're going to get into Dartmouth because you friended their admissions staff?

David Hawkins, director of public policy and research for the National Association for College Admission Counseling, puts it rather diplomatically:

"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.

The real reason it's a bad idea to friend the staff is buried at the bottom of the article:

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.

So almost none of the admissions folks you friend are ever going to look at your profile. And when they do, it's most likely to have no impact--but if it has an impact, it's as likely to be negative as positive. You gain nothing. So don't do it.

But, if you really must friend your college admissions officers, have enough sense to sanitize your profile. If your profile photos have a chance of ending up here you probably don't want admissions folks coming across them.

Read the full USA Today story here.  -----------CJ