Category: admissions and student recruitment

Facebookgate all over again?

Two years ago, Brad J. Ward uncovered a scheme on Facebook involving a company called College Prowler, which was creating unofficial college and university groups in a shady fashion. Enlisting the help of several other higher ed web/marketing folks, Brad exposed College Prowler’s shenanigans to the media and the company quickly backed off. (I summarized the series of events in a post dubbed Facebookgate.)

A year later, Brad was blogging about a similar situation, this time with a company called URoomSurf. This company created a lot of “Class of 2014” groups on Facebook last year, targeting unsuspecting incoming college freshmen by offering to help them find roommates for a fee. The problem was the way the company portrayed itself — as being, in essence, an extension of colleges and universities. This year, that same company — renamed RoomSurf — appears to be doing the same thing with “Class of 2015” groups on Facebook.

The New York Times’ higher ed writer Jacques Steinberg picked up the story yesterday. (You may know Steinberg as the curator of NYT’s college admissions blog The Choice, which I talked about here last spring). Steinberg does a good job layout out the issue. I suggest you read it and pass it along to your campus admissions staff and Facebook administrators.

Thanks to the work of Lougan Bishop, Tim Nekritz and J.D. Ross, several of us in higher ed have agreed to get the word out about these shady marketing practices. Whether our efforts will put an end to deceptive marketing practices on Facebook is uncertain. But at least we can sound the warning for others.

Other posts on this topic:

P.S. – If you’d like to follow the discussion about this on Twitter, check the hashtags #fbgate2015 and #fbgate15.

The envelope, please: dealing with rejection

One of the newest online offerings from The New York Times is a blog of sorts in which six high school seniors talk about the college admissions process: the applying, the waiting, the angst, the rejection letters.

s-REJECTION-LETTER-largeOn The Choice: Demystifying College Admissions and Aid, you can follow along with six prospective college students as they share the drama (?) of waiting for those letters of admission or rejection.

It’s kind of like a reality show for blogosphere wonks.

Times education writer Jacques Steinberg acts as the site’s curator. As he explains in The Choice’s inaugural post, “Our primary goal is straightforward: to demystify and illuminate an American rite of passage that typically occurs behind closed doors, whether it’s the doors to the university admissions office, or those of the homes of the applicants themselves.”

While there is a little bit of a Real World feel to the six students’ posts, it does provide a look into how high school students (and their families) deal with rejection — a lesson better learned sooner than later. Some, like Anne Paik of L.A., puts on a brave front (“I will not let myself dissolve into a miserable puddle of self-pity,” she writes) but admits that “Underneath this cheerful bravado of sunshine and happy-go-lucky attitude, I’m really hurt and disappointed.”

I feel as if I’ve been rejected not just as a student, but also as a person, an individual with unique hopes and dreams. And that kind of personal rejection hurts much more than a rejection based purely on academic achievement. It’s a direct blow to my self-esteem, and causes me to question my own self-perception.

Oh, to be 18 again. (Actually, since I went to an open-admissions community college — which were called “junior” colleges back then — I can’t really relate to the whole rejection thing.)

Others, like Brian C. Bose, shrug off the disappointment with a “didn’t really want to go there anyway” attitude coupled with a fatalistic “the university is telling me something” outlook. Here’s an excerpt from his latest post:

N.Y.U. [which rejected Bose] provides fantastic training in the arts in the city that never sleeps. It’s New York for crying out loud; the “concrete jungle where dreams are made of” as Alicia Keyes sings it.

But the university is missing one key element: a campus, a true community. No school is perfect, and every school we apply to requires a compromise on at least one factor. So I applied knowing that N.Y.U. was missing out on that key aspect.

Besides, “I didn’t get accepted, so the universe decided that one for me.”

Nice to see today’s prospective students rely so heartily on reason and empiricism.

Whether it’s the universe or the blogosphere, something is apparently telling people to read these kids’ posts. Paik’s post, from April 4, has 140 comments, and Bose’s, just published today, has 19 so far.