CSUN University News Clippings

The admissions office finds Facebook

(September 30, 2008)

Back in the summer, Steven Price logged on to his Facebook page one evening to do his usual check-in with family and friends before going to bed. He was surprised when he found a “friend” request from Scott Minto, the director of the admissions office at San Diego State University’s Sports Management Program sitting in his in-box.

“I was blown away,” said Price, 22, a recent college graduate who is applying to business schools this fall and is currently interning with the Minnesota Vikings. “I’d been in touch with other schools through e-mails and phone calls, but I’d never had any schools contact me through Facebook.”

Minto is part of a small but growing number of graduate school and college admissions officers who are aggressively using Facebook to recruit students for their programs. Many have built their own Facebook fan pages, which they are using as a tool to display videos, pictures and news articles about their schools. Others are using the site as a marketing tool, purchasing advertisements and targeting them towards certain demographic of students, based on their age and location. By drawing students to Facebook, schools hope to keep in constant touch with potential students, as well as provide them with important updates on the school, without bombarding them with dozens of e-mails and mass mailings.
Where the Boys and Girls Are

“College and graduate school admissions officers are on the cutting edge of this,” said Nora Ganim Barnes, director for the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, who recently conducted a study of that found that 29% of university admissions departments surveyed used social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace (NWS)—a level higher than fast-growing Inc. 500 corporate respondents. “If you’re an undergraduate or graduate institution and you’re looking to attract people 35 and under, then I think you have to go to Facebook because that’s where your opportunity is,” she said.

This is the case for Minto, 27, who estimates that he spends several hours a day updating the page and communicating with the students who send him questions via the page. The school also spends some of its advertising dollars on other areas of Facebook, placing ads that are targeted to the student audience Minto is seeking: college graduates 24 to 34.

San Diego State’s Facebook page is filled with pictures and videos of campus events, ranging from footage of the school’s involvement in the U.S. Open of Surfing in Huntington Beach, Calif., to students’ visit to the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, Calif. He invites students via Facebook to the admissions open house events that he hosts in different cities around the country and also maintains a blog on the site. The community of applicants interested in the program online has become so active that he communicates with some of them now exclusively on Facebook.

The number of schools diving into social networking sites like Facebook is still small: there are only about 60 schools that currently have official sites on Facebook, Ganim Barnes said. Among graduate programs, she said that smaller schools and programs appear to be more active.
By Popular Demand

At the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, the school launched a Facebook admissions page last fall, mostly in response to student demand, said Richard Powers, Rotman’s assistant dean and director of MBA programs.

“The students kept asking: ‘Do you have a Facebook page,’” Powers said. “It came up so often that we tried it, and it was just a phenomenal success. We use it all the time now.”

The school uses its Facebook admissions page to hold question-and-answer sessions for prospective students, led by the school’s director of admissions, Cheryl Millington. The first chat, held just a few days before the school’s first application deadline last fall, attracted 90 participants, and recent ones have attracted as many as 117 participants.

Niki Healey, director of MBA Admissions at the University of Western Ontario’s Richard Ivey School of Business, said her school launched a Facebook site in February to draw more students to the school. The site gets several hundred hits a day, mostly from prospective students who are checking out posting such as video of the 2008 valedictorian’s speech or pictures from last year’s MBA formal. Students post messages on the page’s “Wall”, asking about registration deadlines or when they can come to campus to visit a class.
Risky for Tradition

“They’re probably not visiting our Web site every day, but they are most likely checking their Facebook page every day,” Healey said. “We decided, let’s be where they are, instead of trying to change their behavior.”

Of course, running an official Facebook page is not something that every school is embracing. In order to have a page that will appeal to students, a school needs someone to update it daily and answers students’ questions in a timely manner, Healey said. Schools also need to be comfortable with the back and forth — and public — interaction between students and admissions officers, she said.

“I think social media can be risky for the tradition of business school recruiting because it is such an open forum,” Healey said. “People can post information, and we have no control.”

Indeed, this is an issue that admissions officers all over the country are struggling with in relation to social networking sites, said David Hawkins, the director of public policy for the National Association for College Admission Counseling, an Alexandria (Va.) group that represents more than 20,000 secondary school counselors and college-admissions officers..

“I think most colleges are just in the period of trial and error, where they want to have a presence, but they are still feeling their way around in terms of what is most appropriate,” Hawkins said. “If you jump into this medium, how do you appeal to students and come off as being tech-savvy enough to get their attention and not appear corny or forced.”

Publication: Business Week