You wake up: it’s noon on a Sunday. Your vision is blurry, your head is pounding, and your whole body feels like it has been hit by a runaway truck speeding down Highway 80. You roll over, groaning into your pillow while simultaneously wondering how the hell you were even able to get home, let alone in bed, and notice your camera sitting next to you. You pick it up, turn it on, and look through all of the photos of a night you scarcely remember. The slutty group hugs, barely-conscious friends sporting their infamous red cups, and the occasional bong-rip action shots seem endless. The obvious next step? You pull up your laptop and put them all on Facebook. Unfortunately, however, your Facebook friends aren’t the only ones who can look at them; colleges can too. With the number of college applicants reaching an all-time high, more and more admissions officers are now turning to Facebook stalking in order to make that final decision.

     A recent survey produced by Kaplan, an education company owned by the Washington Post, found that out of 500 top colleges surveyed, 10 percent of admissions officers said that they’d used social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace to evaluate their applicants.

     In another new study, the director of the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, Nora Ganim Barnes, discovered that 21% of colleges used social-networking sites for gathering information about their applicants. Barnes also said that many universities use these sites when awarding scholarships because it helps to narrow down the pool of applicants.

     “No one wants to be on the front page of the newspaper for giving a scholarship to a murderer,” Barnes said in an article in the Wall Street Journal. “Everybody is trying to protect their brands.”

      With the number of students in the high-school graduating class of 2010 reaching an all-time high of 3.3 million students nationwide, colleges have to go through more applications this year than ever before. Social-networking sites offer another more personable perspective on these applicants, making it easier to weed out the rejections from the acceptances.

     “I don't think that colleges should look at applicants' Facebook pages, because our personal lives and what we do with our friends shouldn't concern colleges as much as our academics and extracurricular activities do,” said sophomore Ali Coopersmith. “By looking at someone’s Facebook page, they can make a lot of unreasonable inferences. As long as an applicant is eligible, they shouldn't be turned away because of their Facebook page.”

     While this view is shared by many who have their own Facebook pages, many colleges would argue that using social-networking sites as a tool to help with the application process keeps them from accepting a student who could potentially harm the school’s reputation.

     The director of Undergraduate admissions at North Carolina State University Thomas Griffin, says that many schools will look up their applicants to see if any of them raise “red flags”, such as inappropriate pictures or posts, suspensions from school, or incidences in which the student was in trouble with the law. In one case, NCSU received an application from a student who had omitted previous violent infractions. The admissions officers went on to find a picture of him on his Facebook profile in which he was holding a gun.

     “We have to use this information to make the best decision for the university,” said Griffin. No school wants to accept a student with a record that may tarnish their name or could be potentially harmful to the student body, so the point can be made that they are protecting themselves from making these mistakes.

     “I think that if we are applying to a college, they do deserve a right to get to know us better, and whether that's through interviews or looking at our Facebook pages, I think that they do deserve that right so they get a better sense of who they are admitting into their school,” said Coopersmith.

     So what is a Tam student to do, with all of these inappropriate pictures up and all of these colleges scouring for that “red flag” that could potentially ruin your chances of getting in?

     “[To keep colleges from accessing their profiles] many people delete their Facebooks completely while they are waiting to hear back from colleges so then the admissions officers can't see their profile,” said sophomore Noey Erskine. “People also hide pictures or make sure that only their friends can see their pictures or wall-posts.”

     “If they [students] are not even smart enough to hide pictures of themselves breaking the law, then even I question if they are smart enough to get into college,” said junior Katie Wong about people posting inappropriate or illegal content on their profiles.

      Another question being raised is why students are posting these pictures and posts at all, if the only thing that can really come out of it is getting rejected from their college of choice. Is there any benefit that could math this potential risk?

     “Some people may think that it will give them a better reputation if they are seen doing something 'rebellious',” said Wong. “Teens have a reputation for being the rebels, and posting stuff like that establishes that definition. It proves to others, peers, classmates and friends that they are at the same level as everyone else, and not some square who follows the conformity.”

 This article originally appeared online on June 11, 2010.