Simon Behrens is a student in Germany, hoping to come to New Brunswick's Mount Allison University next year. When he arrives, he'll have plenty of connections. He already has 263 friends.
Mr. Behrens is a member of Mount Allison Class of 2012, a Facebook group for prospective students that is up and running long before any bags are packed by next year's freshman class. That's because it was created by an existing Mount Allison student who works closely with the school's admissions staff. Besides the Facebook group, there are student-made videos on YouTube and student blogs, commissioned and paid for by the university.
“At the end of the day our best recruiting force is our students,” said Matt Sheridan-Jonah, Mount Allison's manager of admissions. “We just want to take advantage of that.”
It's recruiting season on the campuses of Canadian colleges and universities and this fall more than ever institutions were using popular sites such as Facebook to get their message out. Recent rule changes on the popular social-networking site have also helped to accelerate that trend, opening the door to a range of new uses and giving schools a fresh method for reaching teens and young adults.
“We are on Facebook because our incoming students kept asking us, ‘Why are you not on Facebook?' ” explained Bailey Daniels, assistant director of MBA recruitment and admissions at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management.
This fall, the business school launched a group, Rotman MBA Admissions, which had more than 100 members in its first week and attracted 73 participants to a question and answer session the Sunday before the school's first application deadline.
With more than 40 per cent of its students coming from outside Canada, the school's assistant dean, Richard Powers, said the case for using Facebook was an easy one. “We send people around the world to recruiting fairs. This is a relatively inexpensive form of communication for us. It's a very effective tool.”
Part of the appeal of Facebook for schools is its widespread use with the very group universities and colleges are hoping to reach.
There are more than 60,000 members of the U of T group on Facebook – students, alumni and staff – and there are hundreds of university events and groups listed there.
That college and university students are using Facebook is hardly news. What remains to be seen is how effectively postsecondary institutions can target users of the site without coming across as parents crashing the party.
“The ongoing challenge for any university is that there is a massive generation gap between the people that do recruiting and the people you are recruiting,” said Rob Steiner, assistant vice-president of strategic communications at the University of Toronto. “Every recruiting team and every marketing team is trying to find a way to stay on top of this stuff.”
Mr. Steiner said U of T is still considering how it will use Facebook and other sites, although individual professors and schools such as Rotman have already established a presence there.
“I don't know yet if I want us to think of Facebook or any other social-networking site as a way to introduce people to the university,” he said, adding that the school is still researching its options.
But several other institutions have already taken the plunge.
In the month since rule changes on Facebook allowed universities to set up their own pages, close to 400 around the world have done just that. In Canada, 17 colleges and universities have established pages, although many have not begun to use them.
Stuart Robertson, the web manager for the University of Guelph, recently set up Facebook pages for the university and for its Toronto-based affiliate, University of Guelph-Humber.
