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Toning Down the Tweets Just in Case Colleges Pry

Satyajit Dattagupta, the vice president for enrollment management at Washington College in Chestertown, Md., on Monday.Credit...J.M. Eddins Jr. for The New York Times

Admissions officers at Morehouse College in Atlanta were shocked several years ago when a number of high school seniors submitted applications using email addresses containing provocative language.

Some of the addresses made sexual innuendos while others invoked gangster rap songs or drug use, said Darryl D. Isom, Morehouse’s director of admissions and recruitment.

But last year, he and his staff noticed a striking reversal: Nearly every applicant to Morehouse, an all-male historically black college, used his real name, or some variation, as his email address.

Morehouse admissions officials, who occasionally dip into applicants’ public social media profiles looking for additional details about them, also found fewer provocative posts.

“Students know college admissions departments are looking,” Mr. Isom said. “They are cleaning up their online profiles before they ever apply.”

Morehouse’s experience mirrors the findings in a new report from Kaplan Test Prep. This application season fewer college officials are finding online material that could derail a student’s chance of admission, even though an increasing number of college admissions officers consider the public social media accounts of applicants as fair game.

Of the 403 undergraduate admissions officers who were polled by telephone over the summer, 35 percent said they had visited an applicant’s social media page — a 9 percentage point increase compared with 2012. But only 16 percent of them said they had discovered information online that had hurt a student’s application — compared with 35 percent in 2012.

“Students are more aware that any impression they leave on social media is leaving a digital fingerprint,” said Seppy Basili, Kaplan’s vice president for college admissions. “My hunch is that students are not publicly chronicling their lives through social media in the same way.”

He pointed to several trends responsible for this change.

For one, many parents and guidance counselors now warn teenagers that posting controversial material, or even an offhand comment, online could have long-term repercussions for their college or career prospects.

As a result, in their junior year or earlier, many high school students have started sanitizing their online profiles — making them private, deleting certain posts, removing name tags in photos, using pseudonyms.

Also, today’s teenagers, who are not just digital natives, but native social networkers, use a wider variety of sites and apps than their predecessors. And they are embracing more visual mediums, like YouTube and Instagram, as well as ephemeral messaging apps like Snapchat, and anonymous chat sites like YikYak, where parents and college officials may be less likely to find them.

“Students are quickly moving from one medium to another trying to get away from the grasp of adults,” said Jody Jennings, the co-director of college counseling at Charlotte Latin School in Charlotte, N.C.

The practice of undergraduate admissions officers’ conducting online searches on applicants or seeking out their social media profiles occurs most often at private, highly selective liberal arts colleges that handpick their incoming classes with the idea of creating unique, diverse communities.

Large state universities, whose admissions criteria involve quantifiable measures like grades and test scores, do not have the capacity for individual explorations of applicants’ social lives.

Some smaller colleges forbid their admissions officers from vetting applicants’ online activities because they view the practice as an invasive and subjective exercise that could result in unfair decisions for students.

“I don’t think we should be trolling for information that was not submitted by the students for our use in rendering the decision,” said Debra J. Chermonte, the dean of admissions at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio. At Oberlin, she said, admissions officers may review only the material submitted by students as part of their application.

Some colleges also avoid vetting applicants online because it can be difficult to authenticate that an account belongs to the student in question. “This is a land mine for admissions officers,” said Bradley S. Shear, a lawyer who specializes in social media and privacy. He added that treating one group of students differently than another group could be potentially discriminatory. “That’s why admissions officers have to be very careful if they decide to look up an applicant online or review their social media profiles.”

Yet students and their parents have no way of knowing whether admissions officers at certain colleges look at applicants’ online footprints — or when a college rejects a student based on something found online — because colleges and universities generally don’t post information about their social media vetting practices on admissions sites.

“When they take a college tour, students could ask, ‘Do you guys look?'   ” said Jim Bock, the dean of admissions at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pa. “It’s a fair question."

While applicants may submit online material, like links to an app or video they created, Mr. Bock prohibits admissions officers from going online on their own to look for information about candidates. “Some colleges look; some do not,” he said. “As consumers, students should have access to that information.”

But some admissions directors who have a general policy not to seek out online material about applicants have occasionally made exceptions under special circumstances.

At Reed College in Portland, Ore., in the mid-2000s, for instance, admissions officers were alerted to an online chat room where an applicant who had figured out a loophole in the financial aid system was encouraging others to take advantage of it.

“It did factor into the admissions decision,” said Paul Marthers, who was the dean of admissions at Reed at the time and is now the vice provost for enrollment management and student success at the State University of New York system. “We considered it to be a financial aid fraud situation.”

Although admissions officers within the SUNY system do not research applicants online, Mr. Marthers said school officials were considering posting an admissions transparency statement that they would reserve the right to investigate if a problem came to their attention.

At Washington College in Chestertown, Md., admissions officials do not proactively seek out candidates on social media. But while monitoring the college’s brand online, admissions officers often happen upon applicants who have publicly commented on the college, and they immediately forward those posts to Satyajit Dattagupta, the vice president for enrollment management.

In a phone interview last week, Mr. Dattagupta said he looked favorably upon applicants who posted positive comments about the college and about themselves. But he said he was troubled by applicants who publicly disparaged his college or any other on social media using offensive language.

“That’s a big turnoff for me,” Mr. Dattagupta said. “I wouldn’t want a student like that here.”

The college, however, doesn’t notify students if their social media posts hurt their applications, Mr. Dattagupta said. “We don’t have a mechanism to let a student know they were not accepted because of that particular tweet,” he said.

Next year Mr. Dattagupta plans to post a notice on the admissions site letting applicants know that if they make offensive comments on social media, it could have consequences. “If you are holding them accountable,” he said, “at least you should inform them.”

Many high school students are already aware of the stakes.

Jonathan Yoo, a senior at Claremont High School in Claremont, Calif., said guidance counselors at his school regularly held group meetings with students to instruct them to use their school email addresses when applying to college and to be careful about their public activity on social media.

And Mr. Yoo said he considered the possible repercussions of his comments before he posts them on Facebook or Twitter.

Last week, Mr. Yoo posted a message on his public Twitter account: “Finished my college apps.” Accompanying it was a photograph of a message he had written in pencil on lined notebook paper:

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Toning Down the Tweets Just in Case Colleges Pry. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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