Twitter and College Admissions

One's Tweets can jeopardize one's college admissions decisions (photo from ESPN).

Twitter and college admissions can be like oil and vinegar. For college applicants, we’d like to stress again if we haven’t nailed it into your heads already that you should be mindful of what you write on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media outlets. Do all college admissions officers check the Facebook pages or Twitter accounts of applicants? Absolutely not. Do some? Absolutely. So what you post can indeed matter. It can even mean the difference between an acceptance and a denial.

In the case of Yuri Wright, a football player out of Don Bosco High School and the 40th-ranked player on the “ESPNU 150,” his Tweets ended up getting him expelled from his high school. And his expulsion is of course jeopardizing his college admissions decisions. The University of Michigan, for instance, was heavily recruiting Wright. Not anymore. According to Wright’s high school football coach as reported by ESPN, “We told them about 10 or 15 times to get off (Twitter) and not to be involved in it, but there is always somebody who thinks he knows better…What he wrote was pretty bad, to be honest with you, I can’t even say what he wrote.”

Take a lesson from Yuri Wright. Don’t post anything you wouldn’t want a college admissions officer to read. You have to just assume they’ll be perusing your social media pages. For more information on social media and college admissions, check out this post on Facebook and College Admissions.