MONDAY’S Cavalier Daily contained an article in which the results from a Kaplan survey suggested that at least some admissions offices around the country are beginning to use Facebook in their decision-making process regarding whether or not to admit prospective students. Although to some this may seem like an invasion of privacy, as long as the information used by admissions offices is generally accessible, this use of Facebook and other social networking tools legitimately can and indeed ought to be used by admissions offices.
The initial reaction most of us feel when we know our information is being used for investigative purposes is a quite visceral reaction against whoever is using the information. This impulse makes perfect sense in an age of frequent identity theft and increasing government surveillance in the name of national security. Facebook, Myspace and other networking sites present a different issue entirely. The difference between more sinister threats to private information and someone perusing a Facebook profile is that Facebook pages are by their very nature not private.
Anything placed on such a site is meant for public consumption. This is why people spend time updating their interests, favorite movies and quotes, and uploading thousands of pictures onto the Internet. They are creating a public persona for the world to see, and by the same token, for the world to judge.
This brings us to college admissions officers, whose entire career is based around judging young adults and determining which to admit to their institutions of higher learning. While in Monday’s article the University admissions office asserted that there is simply too much information for them to analyze available on Facebook, I would posit that the longer these sites remain around, the more likely it is that colleges and universities will adapt to using them, whether in targeted cases, such as borderline candidates, or in trying to decide between people from the same schools, or whether through keywords adapted to red flag prospective students.
This brings in the most likely use of Facebook in an admissions context. Institutions could use it in order to foster the community they desire among the student body by selectively weeding out those prospective students they feel threaten it. For example, our University espouses an honor code that explicitly calls for a community without lying, cheating or stealing. Photos of a prospective student swiping the mascot of another school (or some similar prank) might not go over too well.
Similarly, an offhand sarcastic comment or an inside joke might be misinterpreted by an unititiated admissions officer. The same principle can be expanded to schools trying to control underage drinking or drug use. Say a student provides information about activity in a church youth group and writes an essay on resisting peer pressure, then is tagged in pictures from last Saturday’s party, that might easily call into question the integrity of the information provided to the admissions office. If a picture is worth a thousand words, imagine what one can do to undermine a 250 word admissions essay.
Of course, there are inappropriate ways for schools to use Facebook. Schools could presumably use them to determine political ideology and exclude students who do not fall in line with those of the admissions officers or administration. The same could be said for religious beliefs, or sexual orientation.
The world of Facebook is replete with choice. We can choose what we express about ourselves, what applications we add, how serious a face to make in our profile picture. We can to some degree choose how widely our information gets disseminated through controls on privacy settings. We can choose who our friends are, and of what networks we are a part.
Most importantly, we can choose whether or not to belong to Facebook or not. While it may seem like a necessity in a college environment, a force strongly interwoven into the social fabric of the university, it remains a choice. If the information is not there, then no one can exploit it. And so long as students seeking admission to necessarily exclusive institutions voluntarily post information about themselves onto the Internet, those colleges choosing whether or not to admit them have every right to take that information into account.
Robby Colby’s column appears Thursdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at r.colby@cavalierdaily.com.
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