Social Media: New Ways to Pick the Best College for You

Social media sites are dramatically changing the way teens and colleges connect with each other to find the perfect match. Today, a teenager can take a tour of a campus, attend a class, chat with an admission officer and accumulate enough reconnaissance on a school to fill a book — all from thousands of miles away.

Three free sites in particular — Cappex, Zinch and the colleges’ fan pages on Facebook — let students reach out to particular colleges or hope that schools using the sites will discover them (or both). Beyond matchmaking, the sites have clever ways students can research schools: snazzy admission tools, videos, and information on scholarships and financial aid, all served up in easy-to-use formats.

“The traditional high school visits have passed us by,” observes Bob Patterson, deputy director of undergraduate admissions at the University of California, Berkeley. “I see more and more students interacting over the Web.” Berkeley is increasingly using social media to reach students, rather than having its admission reps parachute in to visit high schools.

Cappex and Zinch, which didn’t even exist three years ago, are especially useful in letting students and schools look beyond their regions to find each other. During the past admission season, for example, more than three in 10 high school students who contacted Kalamazoo College, a highly ranked liberal arts school in Michigan, came through Zinch or Cappex.

Facebook college pages are pretty much like any other Facebook interest page, letting you keep up with the latest news and chat with other fans. But Cappex and Zinch work more like matchmakers: Students create profiles on the sites to locate colleges that seem like good fits, while colleges tell the online firms the type of students they’d like to find. Schools might be looking for students with certain grade point averages or standardized test scores, or they may be interested in highly tailored searches. (For instance, a school could use Zinch and Cappex to locate minority teens from the Midwest who play an instrument, maintain at least a 3.4 GPA, and are looking for a medium-sized university near a city.) The sites share their matches with colleges, but the schools won’t know a student’s identity unless the teenager wants to share it.

Meghan Conroy, a college student who attended high school in Neptune, N.J., found Cappex, Zinch, and Facebook offered a huge boost in researching and reaching out to schools. “These sites have so much information in one location,” says Conroy. “It was easier than buying those huge books like the Princeton Review, and it was cheaper.”

Here are closer looks at Cappex, Zinch, and Facebook college fan pages as well as the most helpful features on them:

Cappex

Cappex has about 3,000 schools in its database, including four-year colleges, online, and for-profit schools. Helpful features incude:

* Merit scholarships: Cappex has assembled information on roughly 79,000 merit scholarships offered by particular colleges. Merit scholarships are larger than private scholarships, which are often worth less than $2,000. When I typed in Washington University in St. Louis, I instantly obtained a list of 21 scholarships from the school (nearly all renewable) ranging from $2,500 for dance majors to more than $37,000 for humanities, architecture and science majors.

* Handicapping acceptance: The site’s What Are My Chances? Calculator can generate scattergrams for specific schools, showing their acceptance rates for students who participated in Cappex. The calculator also provides its own assessment of whether the student has a realistic chance of admission into a particular school. When I used it to see if my imaginary California junior could get into Wake Forest, the software concluded that she had just a middling chance of admission.

Zinch

Zinch casts a smaller net than Cappex because it focuses on traditional four-year colleges. The 700-plus schools that participate include the likes of Yale, MIT, Wellesley, Johns Hopkins, Stanford and Vanderbilt, along with hundreds of lesser-known institutions. Among its advantages:

* Social networking: One of Zinch’s big selling points is that teenagers can network on the site so they can instantly discover other students interested in the same colleges and compare notes. A Zinch user can click on other students’ names (first names only) and find out where they attend high school, their profiles, and the colleges that have expressed an interest in them. Students can also screen for classmates from their own schools.

* ‘Shout outs’: College admissions staffers can only contact a Zinch user if the student has chosen to click on the college’s Zinch link and make a “shout out” to the school — sending in his or her own profile information, and getting access to You Tube videos and photos about the school, a discussion board, and other information. When UC Berkeley began using Zinch, the college wasn’t prepared for the avalanche of 1,000 “shout outs” it received in the first month.

Facebook

Visit a college’s Facebook fan page and you’re likely to see virtual campus tours, You Tube videos, photos, comments from current and prospective students, and standard admissions information. Applicants can ask questions or post comments on fan pages; some schools even let them apply through Facebook, giving whole new meaning to the phrase “common app.” Nearly 90 percent of four-year colleges have Facebook fan pages, according to BlueFuego, a higher-ed media consultant.

Many college experts say Facebook fan pages are most beneficial for students who have finalized their list of schools they’ll apply to or ones who’ve been accepted. Before then, teenagers don’t want colleges intruding on their Facebook territory, which they consider their social refuge, says Shelley Krause, co-director of college counseling at Rutgers Preparatory School in New Jersey. Among the Facebook pages’ uses:

* Admissions access: Admission officers use their Facebook fan pages to quickly knock down rumors, correct misinformation in the ether, and to answer applicants’ questions. You can see a lot of errors, for instance, on College Confidential, a popular site with discussion boards about individual colleges.

* Meet and greet: Accepted students can begin their acclimation to college early by participating in their institution’s Facebook fan page. Through this forum, teens can begin meeting their classmates online months before freshmen orientation. That just might make them more chipper at home and more likely to talk with you, which is a nice side benefit.

Written by Lynn O'Shaughnessy for CBS MoneyWatch
Posted by Lindy Kahn, M.A., CEP for Kahn Educational Group, LLC