Colleges Using Blogs To Recruit High Schoolers

A good story in the SE Missourian on the use of student bloggers to give a sense of the flavor of a college.

It's been a while since I had to look for schools, but I do remember how difficult it was to understand a school when you weren't actually there. The first time I saw Washington and Lee was a few weeks before I registered for classes.

The most important part?  The schools are linking to the blogs from their front pages.

Prospective students can easily compare students' thoughts with comments on online networking sites like MySpace or Facebook.com, said Nancy Prater, Ball State's Web coordinator.  "If that doesn't match what they're saying on our blogs, there's a disconnect," Prater said.

Colleges from Colgate University in upstate New York, a small liberal arts campus, to the University of Texas, one of the country's largest universities, now include links to student bloggers on their home pages.