Social Networking affects College Applicants

The Wall Street Journal recently released an article about the affect of social networking sites on college admissions. After surveying 500 of the top, most competitive colleges around the US, they found that a good 10% of admissions staff will use social networking sites in order to further evaluate their prospective students. The two most frequented social networking sites they are said to look at are Myspace and Facebook. Most often, colleges that use these sites for evaluation end up with a negative impression of the applicant, because not everyone shows of the best of their personality.

If you are a senior in High School, applying to college, and you have anything negative on your profile, be it language, pictures, etc. then you could very well hurt your chances at acceptance.

Most of the colleges surveyed claim to use this method only in special circumstances; for instance, if an application raises suspicion, or if another applicant hinted at a character flaw. While I understand their reasoning, the fact that this year there will be a record number of applicants, and it will be hard to decide who to accept and who to reject, I still don’t believe this is right.

Since these sites are public, it’s not exactly a breach of privacy, but I don’t feel that this is the best way to investigate a person’s character. Just because these sites are a place to openly express yourself, doesn’t mean that everyone represents themselves accurately. Most of us are still teenagers, still searching for who we really are. We need to be able to feel like we fit in, to make sure that people will like us. So many people will go to whatever means necessary to do that, and that is what leads to the negative impression. I know many people who are hard workers, wonderful students, and overall amazing people, but their Myspace pages are full of things that don’t relate to who they are at all.

Personally, I don’t think I have anything to worry about, however, I think this is a horrible way to judge character. The only way to truly judge someone is to get to know them personally. That’s the only level on which the connection is deep enough to truly view one’s character.