We were concerned about a trend involving college admissions officers checking out prospective students on Facebook, but it turns out we should be focusing on what's happening the other way around: More and more college applicants are seeking out and friending college admissions officers on Facebook.
According to a 2010 survey conducted by college admissions test-prep company Kaplan, a large portion of admissions officers at the top 500 colleges and universities in the United States was approached by students on the popular social networking site:
We found that 80% of college admissions officers or a colleague in their admissions office had received a Facebook friend request from at least one applicant – an increase from 71% in our 2009 survey. This would imply that applicants are at least open to admissions officers checking them out and it shows that students are indeed driving this kind of new communication.
Incredible, no? One would imagine that students would be attempting to be as private as possible when it comes to their online presences, but in reality they appear to find the idea of opening up access to their social networking profiles appealing somehow.
We can only imagine that this means that those students have carefully cleaned up all traces of party photos from their profiles.
Note: A previous version of this story suggested that it was 80% of college admissions officers that sought out students on Facebook, not the other way around. This was based on an — at that time incorrect — report on AllFacebook. That report, like this one, has been corrected since.
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Rosa Golijan writes about tech here and there. She may be obsessed with Twitter, but still loves to be liked on Facebook.