January 20, 2009

Impact of Social Media on College Recruitment Grows

Jan. 20, 2009 at 02:07 PM | By Dan Obregon | Comment Count

Who said higher education institutions are slow to adopt change? A new study announced today by the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth finds that colleges and universities are outpacing corporations when it comes to the adoption of social media technology. According to the report, “Colleges and universities are outpacing U.S. corporate adoption of social media tools and technologies (13% of the Fortune 500 and 39% of the Inc. 500 currently have a public blog, while 41% of college admissions departments have blogs).”

Additionally, the study finds that the role of social media in the recruitment process has grown tremendously in recent years. According to this press release, some of the key findings include:

There has been significant growth in familiarity with, adoption of, and importance to mission of social media over one year ago.
Adoption has grown by 24% in one year: 61% in 2007 as compared with 85% in 2008. Usage increased for every social media type studied.
Adoption is being driven by admissions departments’ recognition of the increasing importance of social media in today’s world.
Social networking is the tool most familiar to admissions officers, with 55% of respondents claiming to be “very familiar with it” in the first study and 63% in 2008

A significant number of admissions officers use search engines (23%) and social networks (17%) to research prospective students. They use these tools to verify information or research students who are candidates for scholarships or entry into high-demand programs with limited spaces. In all these cases the intent is to protect the school from potential embarrassment. There were no reports of checking every applicant to an institution. Online research appears to be more of a precaution at this point or a source of additional information for critical decision making.

Nearly 90% of admissions departments feel that social media is “somewhat to very important” to their future strategy.

These findings seem to be consistent with another study published by Kaplan in September of 2008 which found admissions departments are already being influenced (both postively and negatively) by the public social networking profiles of prospective students.