Take a Hint, Miami: Recruiting 2.0 Style

Universities paying students to blog as a recruiting tool sounds a little farfetched at first.  Then I think back to when I was trying to choose a college, rifling through piles of glossy brochures and “testimonials” of extremely happy and well rehearsed students.  All I wanted to do was get a glimpse into what real college life was like.  None of them wanted to offer me the negatives, or even just basic daily life information.  Even when Miami offered to show me a dorm room, it was a pre-decided, neat and perfectly decorated dorm with two studious girls sitting on their beds, laptops in use.   It looked boring, or in the least, staged.  So when I ran across this article about Ball States new recruiting program from Fox News, I beamed and applauded.

Seems universities across the nation are letting students spew the good, the bad and the ugly across the web to attract prosoctive students to their institutions.  While some schools, like Dickenson College in Pennsylvania, take the intiative to filter the blog content, others let almost anything fly.  Ball State is a front runner in this, as is MIT.

Commenting on the blogs is a major advantage also, and is a big reason why MIT conducts the student blog through their website in the first place.   They embrace our generation that is used to socializing on the web, in two-way conversations.  So the blogger posts, comments and questions are added, and answers and further comments or opinions are offered.  A full understanding of university life is presented by students and absorbed by the prospects.

This ideal would never have worked in past generations, and maybe not even a mere ten years ago.   While some people today still enjoy laying out all of their options and making excel spreadsheets about the pros and cons of each college choice (ahem, my mother…), young adults today are all about self-reliance and discovering information.  If I want to know something, I can and will find the answer, and find it quickly.  A general concept applied to the college choosing process.  If I want to know how a student really feels about their college during their life there, I can and will surf the web, locate their blog, and get information from them.  Colleges are just catching up to the socialization and self-reliance of their incoming students by making it one step easier for them.

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