So can someone show me how to delete my account now?
So unlikely. First, it wouldn’t be a mole since this is a public forum that is available to all. Second, too much chance for misidentification. Third, suppose there are 5,000 applicants and 10 AO’s. With 500 files each, there just isn’t enough time to put the pieces together to try to identify someone.
Having said that, any online forum should be monitored by schools, companies, retailers, etc in order to address any problems/issues/etc that are brought to light. And some graduate professional programs regularly search socal media sites for negative comments by prospective students.
haha sorry I guess I was exaggerating for effect… I was trying to make it clear that most admissions officers are not going to be combing through tweets
I could see the real value of having a mole during wait list season.
All of these kids are posting “have you heard anything yet? X is my dream school!” While others are posting “I am probably going to state U anyway.”
During wait list season, there is a smaller pool to consider and AO’s have a little more time - no one wants to waste offers on candidates who aren’t serious.
Maybe you all are right, but if I were an AO reading a particularly D-baggy post by an applicant in my forum, I would certainly make the effort to piece together who he/she is and reject him/her.
I still think moles exist. And unicorns! 
Sounds like a good project to build an algorithm + a monitor program to sell them!!! LOL!
I’m sure the check up on certain things, but I can’t imagine they do it routinely. Maybe if you loved a candidate but found him a bit stiff and weren’t sure he/she would fit in, check to see if there are smiling selfies with friends on FB? I couldn’t even imagine another reason to check FB.
“Do you think AOS check prospective students’ social media?”
This does happen occasionally, but not typically. If someone has some very notable, hard to believe item on their application the admissions officer’s (AO) curiosity might be piqued enough to google the achievement to verify it. For insistence, if you claim to have written a book that landed on the NYTimes bestseller list they will likely look you up and make sure your claims are on the level. A graduate level AO I talked to recently said they’d googled maybe two or three people of the 500+ they had for the year.
I can appreciate the notion of “pooh-poohing” this based on sheer volume, but, as the silly ad says “That isn’t how it works”.
If you consider any sorting task you’ve ever had to do, only a fraction of the items present themselves as needing additional information. Most of the decisions can be made based on routine factors.
What @Troyus and @JustOneDad say makes sense to me. I can believe that occasionally an AO wants to fact check something on the application and looks on line for verification. But that’s different from looking at CC.
It would require very little data to precisely pinpoint who an applicant is from a chance thread and crossmatch his or her screen name to an actual person in an admissions database.
If a school wanted to push its yield up, I think it would be easy to create software that could search an applicant database and pick out applicants based on scores and other info from chance posts. A full-time AO mole to compile the data would be useful in such a venture.
It might be the next step to propelling yield another 5-10% for schools looking to move up the ranks.
Not that I am advocating this, mind you, but just saying it might be a pragmatic way to increase yield.
Whether this is/has been done on a small scale already is anyone’s guess, but with yield being an important factor in USNWR rankings, it would not surprise me.
Nah, they’d still have to be able to predict where else the applicant would or would not be accepted, comb through their past posts to make sure the applicant’s ranking of schools hadn’t changed, and spend a whole lot of time confirming they have the right applicant from among the thousands or tens of thousands of applications they receive. It would be much more worth their time to spend those resources on outreach and marketing. Besides, most of the “Chance Me” posts are for Ivy League schools, for which this kind of data mining would be least useful.
If I was an adcom, I’d consider putting $250 in the budget each year for a consultant who would monitor the social media and send us links to students who might be either good fits or bad fits for our next class of admits.
Seems like a better expenditure than paying a staff member to peruse everything in hopes of seeing a reference to our particular school.
$250? That’s like 2.5 hours of consulting time, maybe.
OTOH, monitoring the CC forum for one school and/or searching for mention of that school is pretty easy to do and with $250 you could probably get 20+ hours of someone’s time to do it.
I was about to say the same thing 
And 2.5 hrs would be pushing it.
Well social media consult…I’m thinking $100/hr but I live in Ohio where things are cheap 
Sure, but the way to do it is to sign up lots of places and have a sliding scale.
Sounds like a good summer internship opportunity!
I would think virtually all schools at least monitor the chatter about their schools online. For college admissions CC is an obvious place to pop into and see what is being said. I would expect schools like Harvard, with lots of posts related to them on CC and a pretty clear ranking/prestige level where a few negative comments won’t hurt them, to not read every single post but they might look for a general sense. But for less discussed schools it isn’t that hard. I can pretty easily pop in occasionally and check on the latest chatter on my kids’ schools or my own schools. Colleges would be silly not to in case there is a negative story being spread, misinformation, chatter about some sort of issue with the application process (tours, info sessions, good/bad communications etc).
I highly doubt they analyze kids to protect yield (with the possibly exception of cherry picking kids who stand out positively off the waitlist). However, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they figured out who certain posters were in real life. I’d expect mostly if someone clearly showed themselves to be someone they wouldn’t want at their school (displaying some sort of very negative personality trait, admitting to lying or cheating etc) then they might take a few minutes to try to ID them. I don’t think it would be hard in many cases. But it would only worth the effort if what they read made an alarm go off. I also don’t think they would go looking for people to identify and reject but if in a general checking in and monitoring the chatter about their school they saw some comment (or more likely repeated communication) that jumped out at them enough that they’d want to not accept that student then try to identify them.
On the occasional identifying of a student I am speculating but I’d be shocked if most schools don’t at least occasionally monitor the chatter about them either themselves or thru some sort outsourced service.
It seems and easy job for a student working in admissions.
I’m always surprised that more schools don’t have someone monitor these forums simply for questions. Maybe they’re just too busy.
I’d say some schools monitor these forums quite a bit!
One of S’s friends was a recruited athlete in a big money sport, and was told by several interested coaches that they scrutinize social media and “everything else they can find” for their recruited applicants, well prior to admissions. One added “whether you think you’ve hidden it or not”. They call it the “Don’t be a bozo” speech.
The technology already exists and is in use - perhaps the infrastructure would need to be ramped up before being applied more widely to more of the applicant pool - but it would not surprise me if the economies of scale started to apply making this become a more cost effective way to help identify questionable applicants.