Summary: Inaccurately Vetting Students

Colleges Inaccurately Vetting Students Social media is a way people can share their lives with each other by just the click of a button. Recently, the checking and posting on social media has become a daily routine of almost everyone’s life. This allows people to access an unlimited amount of information in seconds. People that have social media accounts are able to post everything from family vacation photos to what their political views are at any time. While on most social media accounts there are privacy settings where a person cannot see the content of somebody’s account unless the owner of that account has accepted them, once something is online, it no longer is private. By sharing information that everyone can see, people’s private
Universities cannot accurately see who a student is because students can easily control their image on their social media accounts. People are free to post what they want online, but not every user puts their entire life on their social media accounts. While some people are fully themselves online, others can only post items that make themselves look better to the world. In the article “Network Your Way into College?” Christine Wood interviews Thom Golden, the Director of the Office of Undergraduate Admissions at Vanderbilt University, about colleges using vetting student’s social media accounts, and he states, “When we get an application, the student and a counselor have signed it to verify that it is accurate. The Internet provides no such guarantee. Anyone can set up a Facebook profile for anyone they want. There is no guarantee that a page we are looking at was actually created by that student.” (Golden qtd in Wood 14). Although can control the amount they post on their accounts, colleges and universities have no way of knowing what part of a student’s
People who have social media are able to control what they post which allows them to only post certain parts of their life online. Colleges would never know if they were seeing who a student really is because of their online personas. Because everyone changes as they mature, looking far back into somebody’s social media account could lead colleges to see parts of a person life that are very different from how they are now. With the amount of social media accounts that are available, colleges would have to look back through many different social media accounts which would take a long time. Using social media to vet students on all of their accounts would require an amount of time that most colleges could not fit into their admission process. If colleges could judge who their prospective and currents students are by face to face interaction instead of using online sources, they would be able to accurately see who those students really