It may well be. Kaplan released a report last week in which a survey of 320 college admissions officers showed that about 10% of them look at the social networking sites of high school seniors who've applied to their college. The news is not good...

In 38% of the cases where an admission officer looked at an applicants Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, or some similar page it had a negative impact on the student's application. In 37% of the cases it had no impact. And in only 25% of the cases the student's social networking page had a positive impact on the application process.

The percentage of admissions officers who look at an applicant's social networking site goes up for professional schools. About 14% of law school admissions offices and 15% of medical school admissions officers look at social netowrking sites that their applicants have online, according to Kaplan.


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Kaplan said that their reserach also shows that most parents don't think that it's fair for admissions officers to look at social network sites.

Fair or not, the practice is becoming more prevalentYour page may be marked private, but that doesn't necessarily prevent people from seeing it. Google, for example, saves your page in its cache and it it sometimes possible to view the version in Google's cache when you can't see the actual page. The best idea may well be to take your social networking pages down when you begin the college admissions process...