We’re all a click away from digital disgrace
Reality is, we’re a tweet or post away from losing an interview, a job or for many young people — a spot for their first choice college.
The percentage of college admissions officers who believe that incorporating applicants’ social media pages into their decisions is “fair game” continues to trend upward, reaching 65% in the 2020 survey of over 300 of them from Kaplan, up from 59% in 2019 and 57% in 2018.
The study says, among other things, that college admissions staffs are continuing to review applicants’ social media activity and online reputations.
Digital Reputation and COVID
In the age of Covid-19, when we are spending more time on social platforms, it’s important for students (teens) to be extremely careful about their online behavior.
For example, how might an admissions officer react to seeing a photo of you in a large group of friends, with local social distancing and safety precautions not being followed? These are things applicants didn’t have to think about years prior, but may have to do so now.
Life Before Tech
Do you remember when we were kids and the biggest threat a teacher had was putting a grade on our permanent record? We lived in fear of the idea of someone, years down the line, reading about the time when we poured our milk over a bully’s head in the cafeteria.
Then we grew up and learned that employers would never read that permanent record and would never care about the time in tenth grade when we called a teacher a “jerk” before that teacher was out of earshot.
Those were simpler times – times when employers didn’t check credit reports, when college admissions (for the most part) staff only cared about the grades you earned in high school, and earning a bachelor’s degree was optional.
Pause Before You Post
This isn’t the case for our kids. They live in a world where college degrees are now viewed the same way we once saw a high school diploma. The chances of getting even a minimum wage job without one are tiny. They live in a world where they share everything via public and social mediums. Their permanent records start when they’re born and their parents put their baby pictures up on Facebook.
In some ways, this makes them more web savvy than their adult counterparts. They have a seemingly inherent understanding that everything they put online can be accessed by pretty much anybody. The idea that their internet activity is private is foreign to them.
That doesn’t mean that they aren’t still teenagers, and teenagers, as much as we love them, aren’t so great at impulse control. They are also still figuring out who they are, and that means trying out all sorts of different things…things that might be embarrassing later on and things they definitely wouldn’t want to be held accountable for when they grow up and out of a particular phase.
Online Actions, Offline Consequences
The Kaplan study presents a number of problems for kids who are applying to college. While admissions staff have gone on record in a number of publications saying things like awkward selfies probably won’t negatively influence their decisions, they also say that reading things like disparaging comments about teachers and peers as well as proven association with alcohol or other illicit substances could cause them to refuse a student’s entrance into their school.
What makes this even more stressful is that most online reputations are only given a cursory glance. This means that someone in your kid’s chosen school could be inadvertently looking at a profile for someone else with the same name as your child or, worse, looking at a fake profile one of your kid’s rivals set up to be mean.
Being Proactive
So what can you do? As a parent, how much of this is within your control?
Talk to your kids about the importance of their online reputations. Remind them that everything they post online has the potential to go public (and viral). Encourage them to only post those things that they wouldn’t mind being grilled about by their highly prudish great great aunts and uncles over Thanksgiving dinner.
Connect with your kids online as well as at home. Make sure that your kids have friended you on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and that you can follow their Twitter and other social media accounts.
This way you can see what they post the same way their friends can.
Work with them to set their privacy settings to the strictest levels possible. This way, even if someone searches for their profiles, they won’t see anything you and your kids don’t want them to see.
Why not cut them off at the chase? Include links to social media profiles with applications to ensure that admissions officers are looking at the correct profiles. Plus, knowing that those links are included in applications should hopefully encourage your kids to practice some social media decorum.
It pays to be proactive!
