Social Media and College Admissions

The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth has just published Social Media and College Admissions: The First Longitudinal Study by Eric Mattson and Nora Ganim Barnes, Ph.D. The study compares adoption of social media between 2007 and 2008 by the admissions offices of all four-year accredited institutions in the United States. The findings include:

• 41% of US college and university admissions departments have blogs, compared to 13% of Fortune 500 companies.
• 63% of respondents stated that they are very familiar with social networking, and 44% reported they are very familiar with blogging.
• More private schools have blogs than public schools (72% vs. 28%) and 50% of schools with undergraduate populations of less than 2,000 have blogs. However, 22% of admissions blogs did not accept comments, missing the opportunity for engagement with readers.
• 55% of admissions departments feel that social media is “very important” to their future strategy. 89% feel that social media is at least “somewhat important” to their future strategy.
• 40% of schools that were not yet blogging said they plan to add a blog. The next three priorities for new online engagement tools were video blogging (35%), social networking (29%), and podcasting (24%) .