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Opinion
Admissions of Guilt
Should information about applicants found on the Web but not submitted by them be used in admissions decisions?
7/19/2007
Now, as I write this, I remember when I was a kid and owned a bag of black gunpowder and went around blowing things up. Really. I didn't destroy nature or things that mattered to people and wasn't into damaging living things. I just had this bag of gun powder--don't remember where I got it--and enjoyed using it up and having fun with it. Of course, that was in the days when, during the summer, I would be out the back door in the morning and home for dinner, with no one knowing or being concerned about where I was or what I was doing in the meantime. Times are different.
So the issue arose for the school: "Is this the kind of student we even want to matriculate here?" "Can we rescind an acceptance?" "What are the consequences if we do?" "Should we check out all students this way?"
Whew.
And our faculty are involved with this, too. One of the stories I heard recently was about a professor who was waiting to meet a student who had requested a "drop" from her class. The student had claimed all sorts of chronic illness issues and hard luck. When the student was late, the professor did a little Googling and discovered that by his own accounts the student in question was one of the hardest partiers on campus and, in fact, was probably late owing to hard partying described as recently as the night before. When the student showed up, all the professor had to do was mention that she had spent the time Googling him. The request was withdrawn.
Wait, it gets more complicated. Someone else shared that they learned at a recent conference that the kind of person who does the Virginia Tech killing kind of thing almost always feels as though hey "have no choice," that events brought their violence about. Would a rescinded acceptance become a catalyst for violence? Check out Threat Assessment and the Campus Environment (RealAudio).
One discussion participant wrote:
Maybe someone would write a Web app that takes all the applicants' names for the semester, run[s] them through the most popular social sites and google, match[es] key phrases like "bomb," "joint," "AK-47," and return a list sorted by threat level ... then e-mail[s] the applicant saying, "Sorry, we cannot accept your application; we really like you a lot and wish you the best of luck in your educational career."That was tongue in cheek, obviously, and, as people pointed out, there are so many legal liability issues raised. (How do you know that you have the correct Terry Calhoun, for example?)
This, of course, would be done on Fridays because there is less of a chance of incident when these notifications are made on a Friday. [Editor's note: This quote has been cleaned up for grammar and punctuation.]
And then a senior webmaster at a school in the Midwest pointed out PeekYou, which sorta, kinda, is creating a cross-social-network finding capacity. And a couple of graduate students at UNC have created ClaimID, a way to centralize who you are--your identity--on all aspects of the Web.
So, damned if you do and damned if you don't? My advice in July 2007 is don't. But be sure to be asking your attorneys if maybe you should, next year.
About the author: Terry Calhoun is Director of Communications and Publications for the Society
for College and University Planning (SCUP). You can contact him through CT's IT Trends forum by clicking here. View more articles by Terry Calhoun.
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