<p>"High-school seniors already fretting about grades and test scores now have another worry: Will their Facebook or MySpace pages count against them in college admissions?"</p>
<p>College</a> Applicants, Beware: Your Facebook Page Is Showing - WSJ.com</p>
<p>I have no pity for a kid whose Facebook page undermines his or her college acceptances. Everything about that page is within their control. They decide what kind of image they project. They decide who is allowed to see it. If their content is unattractive to colleges, well then, that's a life lesson. </p>
<p>I'm not familiar with MySpace, so I can't comment on that site. But something tells me I'd hold the same opinion.</p>
<p>As for the propriety of colleges looking at the sites, I have no problem with it. They use other media to learn about recruitable athletes. They can't avoid news reports about celebrity applicants. So it would be hypocrital to call a self-published applicant profile (a.k.a. social networking page) an inappropriate source.</p>
<p>$.02</p>
<p>Your $.02 cents is right on the money. I totally agree with you.</p>
<p>That is why there is a private setting. Nearly everyone I know sets their profile to private.</p>
<p>I think colleges, and later on, employers, can get around the privacy settings. But if these adcoms reject students because of their pages, it shouldn't be based on your interests, activities, books, musics, opinions,... and instead on whether or not you have posted pictures of yourself completely drunk and committing illegal activity.</p>
<p>getting around the privacy setting is clearly an invasion of privacy.</p>
<p>The best solution for this is to not even be in a position for bad pictures to be taken of you. </p>
<p>That said, high school is a time for experimenting, and in almost every other country, college applicants are of drinking age. America is just puritanical.</p>
<p>I don't think it should have any effect on college admissions.</p>
<p>I mean most of these kids go on to get drunk anyway once they get into college. 'Internet Stalking' should not be allowed. The admissions officers have no idea of the context of the pictures themselves. Just because someone is holding a beer can doesn't even mean that he or she is drinking it.
One can infer what is going on but the admissions board wasn't actually at the event. All they can do is assume, thus, I think it shouldn't be a factor in making decisions at all. </p>
<p>I have heard horror stories though in the past so I didn't even have a Facebook till the April before I went to college. People were like, "You would love Facebook." and I'm like, "I wanna go to college, haha. Just don't put any sketch pictures of me."</p>
<p>If people are concerned about the content of their pages, they can make their pages private.</p>
<p>My big concern would be people making fake pages of other people. This occasionally happens already as a prank. I would be very worried, at competitive high schools, about kids making damaging fake pages of other kids to sabotage them (especially since there is a common belief that colleges will only take a certain number of people from any given school).</p>
<p>Important to realize that nothing is private on the Internet. Anyone who thinks otherwise is naive.</p>
<p>Friends may decide to share your blog with others. Friends may become enemies. </p>
<p>One also may accidentally leave open one's "private" web pages, which may be seen by others. </p>
<p>Bottom line: Don't put anything on the Internet that you wouldn't want your worst enemy or a college adcom or prospective employer to see.</p>
<p>Well unless your friend rats out on you to Admissions officers, facebook is pretty private. You cannot set your settings to public like myspace unless you're in a network. </p>
<p>I don't think that facebook is an accurate measure of one's true personality in real life. People put on fronts to be cool and a facebook profile should be the last thing you evaluate a student on.</p>
<p>"I mean most of these kids go on to get drunk anyway once they get into college. 'Internet Stalking' should not be allowed. The admissions officers have no idea of the context of the pictures themselves. Just because someone is holding a beer can doesn't even mean that he or she is drinking it.
One can infer what is going on but the admissions board wasn't actually at the event. All they can do is assume, thus, I think it shouldn't be a factor in making decisions at all."</p>
<p>The adcoms can head this advice for all they care but in the back of their mind there will still be that cloud of doubt once they know about it. I'm sure it will ultimately come into play as the deciding factor between two applicants for the last spot.</p>
<p>Couldn't agree more with the adult posters. We have been pounding on this with our two high schoolers and get a lot of the same responses from them that the students on this thread have given. </p>
<p>Who's being naive here?</p>
<p>Adults pushing 50 have a lot more experience with how the real world works than people under 25. We've learned the hard way and want to help young people avoid mistakes. Adult life plays by different rules. </p>
<p>I know the young people who use these sites for social networking don't want to hear about their pitfalls. We are not saying don't use Facebook. We are just warning you to be very careful how you use them. Do not let your guard down online.</p>
<p>Would Myspace/Facebook allow adcoms to actually bypass the private setting to check the applicant's page?</p>
<p>I've seen stupid things on Myspace, Facebook even though the bloggers had used private and I wasn't a friend. People do show other folks things on their friends' Facebook and Myspace pages.</p>
<p>I actually know someone who lost their job because their boss saw something that she had posted on Myspace or Facebook. The boss didn't tell the employee the truth of why she was being terminated: said it was due to finances, not to the person's blogging about hating their job. The boss had seen the blog because a "friend" showed it to the boss.</p>
<p>Would Myspace/Facebook allow adcoms to actually bypass the private setting to check the applicant's page?</p>
<p>I highly, highly doubt that Facebook, a website created by a college student, would abuse the trust of their millions of members just so an admissions representative could look at private photos for incriminating evidence that may or may not be there. Especially with all the hoopla about internet predators and the importance of privacy. And especially since they're already on thin ice with the much reviled "New Facebook" layout.</p>
<p>That being said... if a rep were really desperate to find some dirt on you, he/she might be able to make an account in your network. And of course anything set to "Public" is fair game.</p>
<p>Do you think adcoms ACTUALLY have time to go to Facebook pages? </p>
<p>Like, seriously? </p>
<p>I highly doubt it.</p>
<p>Many stellar students that will be going to top students break the law quite frequently. What separates them from state university students is that they are too smart to let evidence go up in the public internet.</p>
<p>Even if your face-space page is never checked by a rep or potential employer, I find, as a high school student, that the people who set their pictures of them with bottles/cups/paraphernalia/et al. are not exactly going places in life anyway--not because they will be judged upon them, but rather because the character that would put up those type of pictures for the public to see aren't the kids that necessarily will be successful in life.</p>
<p>That's a baseless generalization.</p>
<p>Cups mean nothing, you generalizing tool.</p>
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<p>If people are concerned about the content of their pages, they can make their pages private.</p>
<p>My big concern would be people making fake pages of other people. This occasionally happens already as a prank. I would be very worried, at competitive high schools, about kids making damaging fake pages of other kids to sabotage them (especially since there is a common belief that colleges will only take a certain number of people from any given school).</p>
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<p>I've never actually thought of this, but it seems pretty frightening to me. There are a lot of schools that are this cut-throat and competitive.</p>