I’ve already written a lot about “admission blogs,” blogs maintained by current students hand-picked by Admission offices to provide prospective students and their parents with a glimpse at the college experience.
Whether they are maintained by individual bloggers or a group of blogging students, these blogs can provide real insights on the freshman experience while allowing – via comments or emails – interested high school students to get the scoop on college life.
However, they are often criticized as artificial.
In most cases the selected students receive stipends, salaries or other incentives to post more than once in a blue moon, they have to follow guidelines defined by admission officers, and their posts are closely watched — and sometimes edited.
While prolific bloggers writing for glory do exist, they can be pretty scarce among our busy students. That’s why a few institutions have decided to play the card of the group blog: a unique blog maintained by a handful of (paid or volunteer) students.
However, this doesn’t solve the main issue of credibility.
On one hand, blogging is supposed to offer fresh unscripted viewpoints, which doesn’t seem possible with bloggers screened and recruited by admission offices. On the other hand, student recruiting is a serious business and our institutions are probably not ready (and, who says they should be: it’s marketing, not journalism) for the bad and the ugly sometimes found on the Face Book or My Space blogs.
So, what’s the solution?
Just ask a student!
In January 2004, Matt Goyer, a college student from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada turned Program Manager at Microsoft shortly after he graduated, proposed on his personal blog a complete strategy to offer an alternative to the institutional take on admission blogs written by students: UW Blogs.
In this post written two years ago, Goyer summarized the shortcomings of most admission blogs maintained by students:
“The bloggers come off as marketing puppets and not real people leading prospective students to wonder just what life at Waterloo really is like. This is because the bloggers are handpicked, paid, and not reflective of UW’s students.”
Then, he made the following suggestion that could be easily transferred to other institutions offering free blogging to their students, faculty and staff:
“Editing a ‘Life at Waterloo’ blog. What would happen is that our [blog] evangelist would read a number of blogs belonging to members of the UW community and would then select posts from these blogs that they felt were representative of life at Waterloo and post them to a central weblog. Also, much like people email Chris at the Daily Bulletin links, people could email the evangelist links to posts they felt reflected life at Waterloo. This would provide a more realistic and accurate reflection of life at Waterloo than what is provided by the current UW Bloggers.”
Simple, yet very interesting idea.
I got really excited when I saw that this topic was being discussed on uwebd, as I still feel like it’s something that needs to be examined in greater depth.
I believe the strategy you quote above is a sound strategy. At the very least, it’s preferable over the “handpicked, paid, and not reflective” approach. When I was working on my presentation on this topic for last summer’s conference at Salisbury, I jotted down the following note: “‘Cultivation’ of blogs: provide the tools to students and let them blog freely. Take the cream of the crop and publicize it subtly.” Today, I’d add the following to my note: “Transparency will be rewarded.” (And yes, I will elaborate on this in a blog post!)