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For better or for worse, Facebook has become an integral part of college life. Maintaining friendships without using the site is like socializing at Pepperdine without visiting Waves Café — possible, but rare. Just like at any popular gathering place, students chat with a multitude of friends, watch the interactions of others and joke with each other about the mutual “stalking.”
Students know they are interacting in a public place, but never would they expect an admissions officer to analyze the conversations they hold there.
The same dynamic explains the widespread and justified indignation at the thought of graduate schools poking through applicants’ Facebook profiles.
A study by Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions, which reveals that 15 percent of law schools and 14 percent of medical schools look at potential students’ social networking pages, should disturb even students who think they have “nothing to hide.”
These schools are violating privacy rights and concentrating on information that reveals nothing about those applicants’ potential value to the school.
Facebook pages are visible to the world, but they are designed for a limited, student audience, and they make sense only in that context.
Wall posts that strike an unfamiliar observer as evidence of bad character or disregard for academic ideals might be understood as moral and scholastic to those who know the background. A picture of a student with half-closed eyes clutching a red cup might be poking lighthearted fun at those infamous party photos.
Evidence of drunken debauchery is not the worst that could be found online, however.
At Pepperdine, a Christian college where students live in fear that they will be tagged in an incriminating photo, most assume that grad schools are checking that applicants haven’t partied too hard. Many have heard, for example, that a university sorority was put on probation because its members’ excessive alcohol consumption was recorded on Facebook.
But other information — information students may have no shame proclaiming to the world — could lead schools to unfairly reject otherwise qualified applicants.
Religious and political views, sexual orientation and race can be discovered on these profiles and then used discriminatively. Despite laws prohibiting such considerations, nothing prevents admissions officers from reading a page filled with Bible verses and interests, such as “ministry,” and concluding that a person would not fit in at their school.
Profiles are a vital part of a person’s image and social life. Like the clothes a person chooses to wear at school, they are an important expression of identity.
Commendably, graduate schools want to know “the whole person,” not merely academic achievements and the information submitted in admission essays, and they think social networking sites are the perfect tools. They have stumbled onto Facebook’s central role for college students, but they misunderstand the significance of the analogy.
Someone’s clothing does say a lot about its wearer — to his or her friends, that is. Beyond that context, however, it will often be misunderstood. And, just as it is unfair to fire employees because of the clothing they wear outside of work, it is also unacceptable to deny admission based on an applicants’ self-expression outside of school.
On an application, students showcase their best qualities related to the place to which they are applying. On Facebook, their profile is geared toward impressing and communicating with a different set of people.
This communication is most valuable if it is unrestrained. While the Graphic does not advocate flaunting lawbreaking — pictures of underage drinking or other crimes are a separate issue — limiting Facebook to its intended peer audience is the best way to preserve the site’s appeal.
The important social function of social networking sites would be compromised if those online communities became one more thing to “polish” for the eyes of graduate schools, instead of an authentic representation of the people who use them.
Privacy settings remain a wise choice to block prying eyes, but the impulse to examine students’ personal lives is a troubling reminder of the increasing breakdown between personal and professional lives.
Submitted 09-25-2008
MALIBU, CA
