Social Media and Your College Application: What Students Need to Know

Do university admissions boards look at your social media pages? You can count on it. In fact, you’d better count on it.

A 2020 survey indicates that 36% of college admission officers will track an applicant’s social media footprint through Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and other online platforms — up from just 25% the year before. Roughly one out of five admissions officers also admit that they do social media checks “often,” indicating that it’s fast becoming a regular practice.

Why Are Schools Bothering to Check Social Media Accounts?

Mostly, it’s because they want to know more about each applicant as a person.

People tend to relax a bit on social media, so what you post, who you follow, the memes you share, the causes you support and the comments you make can all be clues to your personality, character and values — clues that aren’t always readily apparent from a transcript and carefully prepared essay.

They’re also looking to head off problems. Admissions officers use social media to look for “red flags” like posts involving alcohol or drugs, images that glorify weapons or violence, and offensive content that indicates you may be sexist, racist, homophobic (or just generally intolerant).

What Effect Will Your Social Media Have on Your Admissions Prospects?

Roughly 38% of those admission officers polled indicated that what they’ve found has positively influenced their perceptions of a prospective student, but another 32% say that it has negatively influenced their decisions.

In other words: Your social media could help you, hurt you or make no difference at all when it comes to getting into your top school — and you need to keep that in mind before you apply.

Consider, for example, Harvard University’s decision to rescind an offer of admission to a high school student in 2019. Although he’d passed all the other hurdles that were in his way, he got tripped up by some racist remarks he’d shared roughly two years before.

What Can You Do to Curate Your Social Media Accounts?

You’ve probably heard this before, but once something is on the internet, it’s on there forever. It’s better to keep your social accounts clean from the start than to try to clean them up later — so, if you’re lucky, you’re reading this long before you plan to apply to college.

If you’re already in high school and you’re worried about what your social media accounts could do to your college prospects, here are some steps you can take to make your social media reflect a better you:

1. Check all your usernames and handles. If any of them are in uncertain taste, change them. Using your own name (or some variation of your name and numbers) makes you seem more mature and responsible.
2. Manage what other people can see. Go through your social media account and archive or delete anything remotely questionable — whether it’s a meme or a photo. Make sure that your profile picture is clear and professional looking.
3. Clean up the pages you follow. Make sure that you’re following things that are in keeping with the person you present in your college application. Look at the pages you’ve “liked” and the people you follow and make sure they’re aligned with the character you want to present.
4. Google your own name. It sounds strange, but you may find a social media account out there that you don’t even remember starting. That also needs to be cleaned up or deleted.

When you’re applying to your top schools, it’s always wisest to remember that you’re not just asking for a spot in a classroom — you’re also asking to be part of the campus community. Admissions officers take the responsibility to their schools seriously, so you want to eliminate any potential red flags from your social accounts as early as possible.