Flawed Logic
College recruiters are constantly looking for innovative ways to attract potential students. Eager high school students are always looking for a way to get college recruiters to notice them. Unfortunately, sometimes this can lead to illogical tactics. A recent article on insidehighered.com reports that The State University of New York at Plattsburgh has hired an outside public relations firm, Media Logic, to create a custom built Facebook application to market itself to new students outside its immediate reach. The application basically asks current students and students interesting in attending the University to solve a series of “challenges”. The article goes on to explain that each challenge requires the students to upload video or photographic evidence that they completed the task. “Challenges can be anything from attending a sporting event on campus to visiting Lake Champlain to wearing Plattsburgh gear in the nearby city of Burlington, VT.” How exciting.
The beta has only been out for a few weeks so the University is unsure of its appeal but I already see some major problems with this logic:
A) Current students have no incentive to participate. It’s bad enough getting Facebook requests to Ninja Fight or play Texas Hold ‘Em every other day; I certainly wouldn’t have time to undertake these “challenges” in addition to my schedule during the semester.
B) Prospective students are crazy. When they really want to go to a certain school they’ll undertake all kinds of unnecessary measures- some sort of psychological thing to make them feel like they are doing everything they can I guess. Anyways my point is that even though completing these “challenges” will have absolutely no bearing on whether or not the participating high school students are accepted, I’m sure several will try to be overachievers and “take on” as many as possible. So now in addition to joining every single extracurricular activity offered at their high schools and convincing teachers to write rave recommendations they will also be running around taking pictures and videos of themselves at various locales. Imagine if schools like Harvard or Princeton started something like this. And while the effort is aimed mostly at students in surrounding areas what if you are an interested student but live in Florida? Taking a picture in Vermont isn’t exactly feasible. Road trip!
More importantly, if they’re going to do this the University should at least come up with tasks that are useful to society, otherwise it’s a complete waste of time. Volunteering through the University’s service organizations perhaps? I’m not even really feeling that because the intentions would not be pure. Since when the college search and application process need a scavenger hunt anyways?
If it’s at all telling, only 60 current students have installed the app so far and there are currently 0 active users. One lame Facebook application isn’t a huge deal, but I’ve read other articles about similar upcoming tactics and if these are the kinds of recruiting techniques colleges are thinking about using, I think they’re headed in the wrong direction.
