May 22, 2006 - 08:06:29 CDT
KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Students considering attending the University of Missouri are logging onto the Internet and reading online journals featuring tales of sipping coffee at a local hangout and signing a lease on a new apartment.The blogs are more than sophomoric ramblings about college life. They are one of several Web-based recruitment strategies colleges across the country are employing as they attempt to lure tech-savvy high-schoolers to their campuses.
As college admission deadlines loom, high-schoolers are increasingly turning to the Internet for behind-the-scenes insight. Next to campus visits, one study shows schools' Internet sites are the most important tool high-school seniors use when evaluating and choosing a college.
Such sites now rank higher than high school visits from campus representatives and direct mailings in importance as recruitment strategies, said Steve Kappler, an executive director at Stamats Inc., a Cedar Rapids, Iowa, firm that provides consulting services to about 100 colleges and universities a year. The group's decade-old survey is called "Teens Talk."
The importance of the Web has schools beefing up their Web sites.
Calvin College, a Christian school in Grand Rapids, Mich., enables its prospective students to arrange furniture in their residence hall rooms using an online program dubbed the "Dormulator."
North Dakota State University's Web site matches current and potential students with similar interests and encourages the interested students to e-mail questions about life on the Fargo campus.
And students at Franklin & Marshal College in Lancaster, Pa., muse about college life in video Web logs, called "vlogs."
Providing students a less edited view of campus life creates challenges for school officials worried that typos or inappropriate material might harm the school's image.
But Kappler said the casualness of the blogs is what students find appealing. And he urged schools to leave the blogs unedited unless they contain something "egregious."
That's the approach taken at the University of Missouri-Columbia and Ball State University in Muncie, Ind.
"We wanted them to be authentic," said Nancy Prater, the Web content coordinator at the Indiana school, where the blogs have averaged more than 10,000 visits a day since Christmas break. "If we got too involved as marketing experts in editing their words, it wouldn't sound right at all. You can't get into that mode when you aren't a student. We would rather have spelling and grammatical errors and have it be authentic than have it be perfect and not authentic."
She said when she talks to colleagues at conferences, one of the main things keeping people from blogging is the "the fear factor of turning it loose and having it a little less controlled."
But she noted that prospective students already have unedited glimpses of college life thanks to college networking site Facebook.com and MySpace.com, a popular Web hangout for teens and young adults.
"I think you are a lot better off choosing the people talking about you," she said.
These social networking sites have generated concerns that youth are providing too many personal details about themselves, opening themselves up too victimization from sexual predators. The sites also have been used to post threats and bully classmates. And some college officials fear employers will be less likely to hire their graduates after reading Web postings about drunken parties.
Michael Stoner, president of mStoner, a Chicago-based consulting firm on university communications and marketing, said providing students' accounts of college life is worth the risk because teenagers place so much importance on what their peers are saying.
"Enrollment managers and admissions people have had to get used to the fact that they are going to give up some of the control and give it to 17- and 18-year-olds," he said.
Ryan Schreiber, a junior at the University of Missouri-Columbia who is majoring in magazine journalism, is one of the bloggers being entrusted with this task.
"One of the things obviously about student recruitment at any school is the people generally talking to you about the university are selling the school and getting paid to get you to come to the school," said Schreiber, who is from Orange County, Calif. "It's a really good way for prospective students to hear things from real students who don't have an agenda and are telling it the way they really see it as a student."
The school first began using student blogs three years ago, not to attract new students, but to help connect alumni to the school.
Soon the admissions office started referring potential students to the University of Missouri Alumni Association's Web site, which originally featured two freshman but has grown to include blogs from upperclassmen and even a recent graduate.
Because of the blog's popularity, the school's admissions office began its own blogging effort in late October, said Brad Finnegan, admissions recruitment coordinator for the school. The admission office's blogs are only accessible to admitted students.
"Our goal with the blogging and Web site in general," Finnegan said, "is to increase our yield net."
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