Teenagers and young adults often spend hours on social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, and the students at Boston College are no exception. Students often use these social networking tools to keep in contact with old friends, make new friends, share information, and to do a variety of other things. These online tools are meant for private communication between friends through sharing messages, photos, and videos.
Recently, however, these social sites have taken on a new function. Numerous admissions officers throughout the country have begun to use these sites as a means of investigating the personality and social behaviors of prospective students.
According to a Kaplan study of 500 top universities nationwide, 10 percent of all college admissions officers visit an applicant's social networking site. "The social networking frontier is a bit like the Wild West for colleges and universities," said Jeff Olson, executive director of research for Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions. "Everyone is trying to figure out how to navigate it. The vast majority of schools we surveyed said they have no official policies or guidelines in place regarding visiting applicants' social networking Web sites, nor are they considering plans to develop them."
This practice does not necessarily have unfavorable results for applicants. According to the study, a quarter of those who reported viewing applicants' sites said that these viewings have generally had a positive impact on their evaluation. Unfortunately, however, 38 percent reported that applicants' social networking sites have generally had a negative impact on their admissions evaluation.
Law school admissions officers are especially likely to check an applicant's Facebook or MySpace page. The study found that 15 percent of law school admissions officers have personally visited applicants' social networking sites, and more than half said it negatively impacted those students' admissions chances.
Students applying to medical or business schools also should be wary, as 14 and 9 percent of admissions officers, respectively, will check their social networking pages. This means that some undergraduates at BC who plan to apply to different graduate schools in the next few years could have their applications skewed by Facebook photos of their weekend parties.
John Mahoney, director of admissions at Boston College, said that BC does not use Facebook or MySpace in the evaluation of applications. "Given the volume of applications we receive and the complexity of our review process, we simply would not have time to do this. We also feel it is important to use the credentials that we actually require of students in making our decisions," he said. "We are admission professionals, not private detectives."
Mahoney said that the only exception to this policy would be if the University learned about objectionable information being displayed by a candidate on one of these social networking sites. "In that case, we would be obligated to investigate a site if a candidate posed a threat to our community," Mahoney said.
The use of Facebook and MySpace can lead to legal dangers in college as well. While students can control access to their profiles, Facebook's privacy policy specifies that these limits do not apply to lawful requests, which include subpoenas and court orders. In October 2006, police at Penn State University used a Facebook group called "I Rushed the Field After the OSU Game" to charge two students with criminal trespassing. A Facebook group's creator was held responsible at Michigan State University in 2007 for the start of a riot at the Cedar Village Housing Complex. In October of last year, charges were brought against 15 Alexander Hall residents at George Mason University based on photos posted on Facebook that showed underage drinking. Pictures from Facebook were also used to cite violators of the university alcohol policy at North Carolina State University in October 2005, and charges included underage drinking and violations of the residence hall alcohol policy.
While currently BC does not use Facebook or MySpace to research what goes on in the residential areas, students should still be cautious about what they put on their personal pages and groups, as they may be legally responsible for the content. Though the majority of admissions officers for undergraduate and graduate schools do not use these tools for reviewing a candidate, far greater numbers of companies than before are using these social utilities to judge their possible employees.
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