Colleges Use Facebook to Recruit Students
As students 'friend' admissions officers schools embrace social media.
April 1, 2011— -- Laura Harrison always knew she wanted to go to Brigham Young University. The 17-year-old from El Dorado Hills, Calif., calls the Utah school her "one and only" and only bothered to apply to one back-up college.
With her heart set on the university, Harrison began using Facebook to connect with the staff.
"I pretty much stalked the BYU admissions page," she said. "It got to a point that I was posting on their wall on a weekly basis."
Harrison asked questions about the university and the application process through the BYU admission office's Facebook page, a site designed to recruit and inform prospective students.
While Brigham Young holds a particular appeal to its applicants -- its Latter-day Saints affiliation -- it does fit into a broad trend across college and university campuses of all affiliations, shapes and sizes: Where academic institutions may have once dismissed social media interaction, many are now embracing it.
According to a recent Kaplan survey of college admissions officers, 82 percent of American universities have set up Facebook pages to communicate with prospective students during the admissions process.
"College-aged kids use social networking a lot," said Jeff Olson, Kaplan's vice president of research. "A majority use it every day. Now colleges are recognizing what a powerful tool it can be."
Olson said that over the past few years, attitudes toward colleges using social media have changed. Initially, people saw universities engaging with prospective students over sites like Facebook as a negative interaction, he said.
"There was this 'Oh, no!' reaction at first," he said. "But as social networking becomes more popular, people are warming up to the idea."
A lot of the fear stemmed from the belief that colleges would use information found on an applicant's Facebook profiles against them, he said.
"There's this urban legend that every college admissions officer checks every student's Facebook," Olson said. "Honestly, it doesn't happen that often, but that doesn't mean it can't happen."
