Admissions officers at Morehouse College in Atlanta were shocked several years ago when a number of high school seniors submitted applications using email addresses containing provocative language.
Some of the addresses made sexual innuendos while others invoked gangster rap songs or drug use, said Darryl D. Isom, Morehouse’s director of admissions and recruitment.
But last year, he and his staff members noticed a striking reversal: Nearly every applicant to Morehouse, an all-male historically black college, used his real name, or some variation, as his email address.
Morehouse admissions officials, who occasionally dip into applicants’ public social media profiles looking for additional details about them, also found fewer provocative posts.
“Students know college admissions departments are looking,” Isom said. “They are cleaning up their online profiles before they ever apply.”
Morehouse’s experience mirrors the findings in a new report from Kaplan Test Prep. This application season, fewer college officials are finding online material that could derail a student’s chance of admission, even though an increasing number of college admissions officers consider the public social-media accounts of applicants as fair game.
Of the 403 undergraduate admissions officers who were polled by telephone over the summer, 35 percent said they had visited an applicant’s social-media page – a 9 percentage point increase compared with 2012. But only 16 percent of them said they had discovered information online that had hurt a student’s application – compared with 35 percent in 2012.
As a result, in their junior year or earlier, many high school students have started sanitizing their online profiles – making them private, deleting certain posts, removing name tags in photos, using pseudonyms.
The practice of undergraduate admissions officers’ conducting online searches on applicants or seeking their social-media profiles occurs most often at private, highly selective liberal arts colleges that handpick their incoming classes with the idea of creating unique, diverse communities.
Many high school students are already aware of the stakes.
Jonathan Yoo, a senior at Claremont High School in Claremont, California, said guidance counselors at his school regularly held group meetings with students to instruct them to use their school email addresses when applying to college and to be careful about their public activity on social media.
And Yoo said he considered the possible repercussions of his comments before he posts them on Facebook or Twitter.
Recently, Yoo posted a message on his public Twitter account: “Finished my college apps.”
