Schools browsing Web profiles

0 Comments | Deseret News (Salt Lake City), Oct 13, 2008 | by Wendy Leonard Deseret News

Many college students submerged in the information age can't resist the urge to post personal information online. But some aren't aware that important people might be using Web sites to check up on them.

A recent survey shows that one out of 10 college admissions officers has visited an applicant's social networking site as part of the decision-making process leading to acceptance or non- acceptance to schools and programs.

"The social networking frontier is a bit like the Wild West for colleges and universities -- everyone is trying to navigate it," said Jeff Olson, executive director of research for Kaplan, Inc., which conducted the survey of about 500 top colleges and universities. Kaplan provides educational and career services for individuals, schools and businesses.

Although the majority of school officials surveyed hadn't even considered using applicants' public profiles for admissions screening, many weren't above the option.

Some schools have established policies against using the Internet to judge a person's viability as a student, while others peruse them for an added tidbit of information.

For the most part though, officials only use the sites to contact potential students when other methods fail.

A growing popularity of sites such as Facebook seem to be pulling in employers and others who might have a hand in the future of some students, due both to curiosity and the amount of information available on some profiles.

University of Utah student Will Leavitt said he began using Facebook just to keep in touch with friends attending schools in other states. He chooses to keep his profile private but friends and members of his various networks can view it and send him messages.

"I would feel comfortable giving my Facebook to a potential employer if it was to give me an advantage over the competition for the job," he said. "I think that if an employer wanted to get a better idea of the potential applicant and looked at their Facebook page, that would be fine."

Leavitt, however, said it wouldn't be cool if employers or admissions counselors used the information they personally didn't agree with on the page as a deterrent to selecting the individual.

According to Kaplan's survey, many parents don't believe the use of online networking sites to determine the outcome of students' futures is fair. Many colleges across the country have bypassed the idea altogether, coming up with their own sites to which potential students can post admissions applications and other information.

"If they direct us to it in their application, we'd look at it. But for the most part, we are open enrollment and look mainly at grades and test scores and things like that," said Chris Rivera, head of admissions at Weber State University. He said criminal activity or threats against students found online would be cause for further investigation, but other things aren't considered for admission.

"We don't have a policy on it, but we don't use those sites to make an admission decision," Rivera said.

Regardless of who is looking, students still continue to use the Internet for socializing and likely post information that may or may not incriminate them, but some like Leavitt intentionally keep it clean, realizing what they post online may come back to haunt them.

E-mail: wleonard@desnews.com