Facebook Keeps Kids out of College

Colleges are looking at more than your transcripts when deciding whether or not you get to go to your dream school.

April Foster, a straight-A honors student all through high school, had been accepted to Franklin Roberts College in Connecticut with a partial scholarship. But April's excitement was short-lived, as she soon received a second letter from Franklin Roberts telling her that, due to information that had been gathered from her Facebook page via an independent consulting firm, her admittance was being revoked.

Colleges across the country are consulting with a company called Academic Profiling Facebook Lifestyles (APFL), a Kansas-based organization that assesses prospective students' Facebook pages. The APFL is gathering data from the Facebooks of kids as young as 12 and 13 years old.

Gill E. Bell, a profiler for the APFL, told me in a telephone interview that "colleges are interested in students' Facebook pages because it is a forum where teenagers often display what they manage to hide in the application process - things colleges have a right to know."

He said that the organization gains access to our Facebooks by hiring other teenagers to pose as "friends" to people of interest; they then, of course, have complete access to our Facebook profiles.

"Colleges are especially interested in chat-speak and cursing," Bell told me. "They want to see that students admitted to their school speak intelligently outside of the classroom, as well as within it." He also expressed extreme disdain for the use of emoticons, calling them "juvenile and entirely unnecessary."

Bell said his company is even monitoring our time spent on Facebook for prospective colleges. If you're on Facebook more than 10 hours a week, you're at risk.

Also, all you Farmville junkies out there better watch out: Colleges are seriously looking at the amount of time spent on online games.

Bell said there is a list of 10 major "Facebook Offenses" (see chart), and that if any potential student is guilty of three or more, they're automatically out.

An anonymous college director of admissions addressed the issue of ethics in regard to using the APFL, saying there were some concerns, but she felt it was a "necessary evil to weed out undesirable students in the ultra-competitive world of secondary education."

The best advice, apart from deleting your Facebook, is to set all your privacy settings to the most secure level, and to go through your friends and make sure you personally know all of them.

Prospective college students and their families concerned about how their Facebook activity will affect their chances of admission can share their fears at backtalk@phillyBurbs.com.

For more information on APFL, click here.