More than 20 percent of colleges and universities review their students’ social-networking profiles, and more than a quarter search for student information via search engines, according to Nora G. Barnes of the University of Mass.-Dartmouth’s Center for Marketing Research.
Scott J. Cech’s article in the Dec. 19 Education Week cites Barnes’s work in a story about the increasing percentage of colleges and universities who dig into the social networking profiles of current and potential students.
Some high school students are taking the bull by the horns and using specialized online sites to send information about themselves to college admissions offices in hopes of gaining an edge.
Sites like Admish.com, Cappex.com, EdSoup.com, and Zinch.com are geared toward high schoolers who want to increase their college chances. Zinch, for example, has more than 250,000 student members in the US and abroad, according to Cech’s story. Students sign up for free, then upload photos, detailed personal information, and multimedia files. Zinch makes money by charging colleges and universities to access the service. Cech writes that about 400 colleges so far have done so.
There are other sites headed down this path as well in addition to providing some 2.0 search utility. Check out http://www.CampusExplorer.com
I think it’s a bit cleaner and more interesting than Cappex and EdSoup (which is build by an ad agency out of Salt Lake)
No doubt, there’s a new world forming around college admissions.
Thanks, Mark.
Because of its national scale, it’s not surprising that there’s almost too much information there to go through. But the search function is pretty intuitive.
Plus, some of the videos are fun to watch.