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Colleges Use Of Social Media

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Social media is a way people can share their lives with each other by just the click of a button. This allows people to access an unlimited amount of information in seconds. People can post everything from family vacation photos to their political views at any time, and this can reveal more about a person than they realize. On most social media accounts there are privacy settings which allows a person to control who see the content of their account. By sharing information that everyone can see, people are making their private lives are more public. Universities have begun using social media as a way to keep track of their current students and their prospective students in and outside of school by monitoring what they post. Even if students …show more content…

They also allow for social media accounts to become less open and more personal. Lori Andrews, a law professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology, said in the article “Colleges’ Use of Social Media Underwhelming” that, “It isn’t set up for the public at large. You have to OK friends to join. It gives the impression that you’re talking to this small group of friends. The nature of the information, the post, has traditionally been considered private. It should be non-accessible to employers and schools” (qtd in Kadaba 4). Colleges’ looking through a students’ social media account are an invasion of their privacy. If students have their privacy settings turned on, the student never intended on having colleges, admissions employee look through all of the pictures and posts on the account. Although everybody should monitor what they post on their social media, everybody does have the right to post anything online and control who sees the content of their account. If colleges see something on a social media account that might be against the standards of the college, they need to remember that nothing on a social media account was intended for them to see because it was only supposed to be seen by a certain group of people. By colleges using social media as a vetting tool for students, they are invading their private …show more content…

Many people often have more than one social media account, and on each account they will post several times a day about different topics. If colleges wanted to use online accounts to vet current and future students, they would need several people and a long period of time to do the searching. The University of Virginia’s dean of admission stated, “Frankly, we don’t have the time to look for individual student information on Facebook, and sometimes I doubt the authenticity” (qtd in Greenwood 2). Admitting students into college can be a very long process and by adding a social media check to the process would be time consuming and unhelpful. People use their social media as a way to express themselves, and many people have a lot to post on their accounts. Millions of students submit their application to the colleges they want to attend each year. In addition to looking through all the applications students send, colleges would have to look through every social media account that the possible student has. In the article “Network Your Way into College,” The director of the Office of Undergraduate Admissions at Vanderbilt University said, “College admissions representatives simply don't have time to look up an applicant's Facebook profile” (qtd in Wood 14). Colleges have to look through many different items on many different applications during the process of

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