Your MySpace killed my scholarship
- TAGS:college, Education, MySpace, scholarships, social networks, UMass
- IT TOPICS:Careers, E-Business, Internet
What you put on your MySpace - or what your friends put there - could kill your scholarship. Or your maybe it's your kid's scholarship.
About one in five college admissions offices are searching social networking sites and using search engines to conduct background checks on potential students before awarding scholarships, according to Social Media and College Admissions, a study conducted by the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. 
The most commonly searched sites were Facebook and MySpace. The most popular search engines used by college admissions were Google and Yahoo.
The lesson here: Google yourself before applying for that scholarship. And be careful what you (or your kid) post about yourself.
No schools spend the time to check every prospective student, but schools were careful to check the backgrounds of students who might win a scholarship. "In all these cases the intent was to protect the school from potential embarrassment. No school wants to announce the winner of a prestigious scholarship only to have compromising pictures be discovered on the Internet the next day," the report says.
The authors expect the presence of admissions offices on social networking sites to increase. That doesn't bode well for kids like my neighbor, who posted a photo of himself on a public MySpace page with the caption "me, wasted."
Such slip-ups could mean no scholarship. And maybe no admission either.
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