Colleges Use Facebook to Screen Applicants

The discovery that admissions officers at selective American universities were looking at the Facebook profiles of applicants generated a predictable cycle of coverage — alarm, advice columns about social media hygiene, counter-arguments about privacy, and eventually a shrug as the practice became so widespread that treating it as news required ignoring how thoroughly it had been normalized.

The practice raises genuine questions about what college admissions is actually designed to assess. The formal application process — grades, test scores, essays, recommendations — is designed to evaluate a student's academic preparation, character, and potential contribution to the college community through channels that allow for reflection, revision, and presentation. The Facebook profile reveals a different kind of information: spontaneous, social, often unguarded, produced for an audience that did not include admissions committees.

The legal framework around college admissions is designed to prevent the use of certain protected characteristics — race, religion, national origin — in admissions decisions. The social media profile can expose all of these characteristics simultaneously in ways that the formal application process is designed to avoid. An admissions officer who looks at a Facebook profile before reading an application cannot unknow what she has seen.

The counterargument is that the information is public — the student chose to post it without privacy restrictions — and that character, judgment, and how a person presents themselves to peers are legitimately relevant to admissions decisions. This is true as far as it goes. The discomfort is not that the information is irrelevant but that the channel through which it was obtained was not designed for the purpose to which it is being applied.

The practical advice for applicants remains simple: treat anything publicly visible on social media as potentially visible to anyone evaluating you for any purpose. This is either a counsel of prudence or an argument for the privatization of young people's social lives, depending on how you weight the competing interests.