Universities Weblog

(Source: Dickinson College)

In an effort to spark interest in their institutions, college admissions offices are enlisting student bloggers to "speak the truth" about life on campus. What passes for "truth" remains open for debate.

Consider this from CNN.com:

Colleges seeking a competitive edge are increasingly enlisting and sometimes paying student bloggers to chronicle their lives online.

The results run the gamut from insightful to boring, but the goal is the same: to find a new way to win the attention of the MySpace generation.

"We found it a much freer, less constricting, far more believable way of letting prospective students glimpse what was going on on campus," said Seth Allen, dean of admissions at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania.

Universities balance giving the bloggers the freedom to speak their mind while maintaining some control over content.

Some, such as Dickinson, read postings before allowing them on the Web site to guard against offensive language. Others, like Ball State, say that defeats the purpose.

Prospective students can easily compare students' thoughts with comments on online networking sites like MySpace or Facebook.com, said Nancy Prater, Ball State's Web coordinator.

"If that doesn't match what they're saying on our blogs, there's a disconnect," Prater said.

Colleges from Colgate University in upstate New York, a small liberal arts campus, to the University of Texas, one of the country's largest universities, now include links to student bloggers on their home pages.

Read the full article here.

Bottom line: prospective students will always look beyond campus-produced marketing materials to learn insider secrets about colleges. They always have. Blogging is just the newest way of finding them. Of course, blogs that are sanitized by admissions offices run the risk of becoming untrustworthy–not unlike marketing pabulum.

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