New on the college admission checklist: LinkedIn profile

Social media experts are coaching students to take control of online personas

You want a trip to Philip Morris International Inc. to feel like a visit to Marlboro Country. But the company’s Swiss research centre, aka the Cube, just won't play along.

Applying for admission to many American colleges already has high school students jumping through hoops.

School transcript? Check. Recommendations? Check. Personal statement? Standardised test scores? List of accomplishments? Check. Check. Check.

Now some social media experts are advising high school seniors to go even further. They are coaching students to take control of their online personas — by creating elaborate profiles on LinkedIn, the professional network, and bringing them to the attention of college admissions officers.

“They are going to click on your profile,” says Alan Katzman, the chief executive of Social Assurity, a company that offers courses for high school students on how to shape their online images.

Last year, for instance, Katzman’s company advised a high school senior in the Washington area to create a detailed LinkedIn profile and include a link on his application to Harvard. (His mother asked that the student's name be withheld for privacy reasons.) Soon after, LinkedIn notified the student that someone from Harvard had checked out his profile.

The student is now in his first year at Harvard. Whether the LinkedIn profile had any bearing on his admission is unknown. Harvard did not respond to a request for comment. But Katzman says that high school students who use social media to showcase themselves may gain an edge with colleges.

“No one has quantified the power of this,” Katzman told me recently. “But I maintain that it is very powerful.”

Public schools from San Francisco to New York City are teaching online conduct skills as part of a nationwide digital citizenship push to prepare students for colleges and careers. Teenagers who set up LinkedIn profiles in the hope of enhancing their college prospects represent the vanguard of this trend.

But the phenomenon of ambitious high school students on LinkedIn also demonstrates how social networks are playing a role in the escalation of the college admissions arms race. For students in high-pressure schools who already start packaging themselves for college in ninth grade, LinkedIn could add yet another burden to what might be called the careerisation of childhood.

“Will an overstuffed profile become a must?” asked a review of LinkedIn by Common Sense Media, a non-profit children’s group. “Also, is it even healthy for kids to be so future-focused?” Teenagers, the site concluded, “should think twice before posting an online résumé.”

Professionalised teenage résumés could also further intensify disparities in college applications.

“Kids from privileged families tend to do more of those things both offline and online — joining school clubs, writing for their school newspaper, getting tutoring so their grades go up, doing SAT preparation,” says Vicky Rideout, a researcher who studies how teenagers use technology. Using LinkedIn on college applications, she says, “is yet another way for there to be a disparity between the haves and the have-nots”.

For high school students, LinkedIn is partly a defence mechanism against college admissions officers who snoop on applicants’ public Facebook and Twitter activities — without disclosing how that may affect their chances of acceptance.

A recent study from Kaplan Test Prep of about 400 college admissions officers reported that 40 per cent said they had visited applicants’ social media pages, a fourfold increase since 2008.
 

© 2016 The New York Times