Your Future is in the Hands of Facebook

Your Future

is in the
Hands of

Remember when you thought it was cool to post pictures on Facebook of you and all your friends with red cups in your hands? Sure, it was cool when you were 16 maybe 17 years old, but what’s not cool is the effect it could have on your future.

High School students post pictures and statuses on Facebook every single day. What you probably don’t know about this is that today (yes, this very day), more than 80% of all colleges use social media as a form of recruitment. Not only is it scary that colleges use Facebook, but more than half of schools actually use it in their decision process.

You would think that they wouldn’t look at your page out of all the applicants that they have, but some admissions officers said they had rejected students because of material on the sites. You may think that your pictures are harmless, but a teenagers opinion is different than somebody who is reviewing your college application. Colleges take things more seriously than high-schoolers do because potentially, you are the one that is going to be representing their school.

According to a recent Kaplan Test Prep survey of 350 admissions officers, more than 25 percent of school officials said they had looked up applicants on Facebook or Google. Anna Redmond, a 30-year-old former interviewer for Harvard University who blogs about college admissions, says that she started regularly googling prospective students years ago. She says that she would find posts of applicants complaining, and sometimes even pictures of underage drinking.

Once this information started spreading about how college admissions check your Facebook page, high-schoolers started deleting their profiles. A senior from BASIS Scottsdale in Arizona, Abigail Swift, deleted her Facebook page at the start of junior year when she was beginning her college search. “I don’t want what I put on my Facebook or what I don’t put on my Facebook to sway their opinion of me,” she says, “I just don’t think it’s fair for them to base acceptance on that.” Many students agree with Abigail and are starting to either delete their profiles, or change their names on Facebook so they cannot be found.

Colleges' recent interest in social-networking sites is leading many aspiring students to take a hard look at their online habits and in some cases to remove or change postings. It is good that colleges have been looking at Facebook profiles because it teaches high school students to be more aware of what they post online for others to see.