Some US students say colleges are factoring in their social media posts about subjects like mental health and body positivity during the admission process
Tatum Hunter / Washington Post : Tweets: @film_girl , @marshacollier , @kari_paul , @mattnavarra , and @washingtonpost Tweets: Christina Warren / @film_girl : On the one hand, I think it is utterly messed-up for colleges or even recruiters to use teenagers social media accounts to determine if they should be accepted into a program or not. On the other hand, I really need the teens to know about alt accounts. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... Marsha Collier / @marshacollier : TikTok loves true confessions. Colleges, not so much. 👉 GenZ grew up online. 👉 Their ‘digital footprints’ may haunt them. #socialmedia https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... https://twitter.com/... Kari Paul / @kari_paul : not to be a luddite but it does seem concerning that the most popular platform for young people algorithmically encourages oversharing and trauma dumping with no safeguards in place for what that means in the future https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... Matt Navarra / @mattnavarra : U.S. college admissions officers continue to look at TikTok profiles and other ‘digital footprints’ The no. of college admissions officers who visited applicants' social profiles in 2022: 1 in 4 https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... @washingtonpost : Generation Z grew up online. Their “digital footprints” on apps such as TikTok may haunt them. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ...
Context & Ripple Effects
This lands more than three years after Washington Post reporting revealed that [[a:946833|~44 US universities were already paying outside companies to data mine and rank applicants, including tracking web activity]] — meaning the vetting machinery predates today's story. What's new is the substance of what gets judged: students say posts about mental health and body positivity are being read as red flags, not just the party photos schools historically scanned for.
It also puts a concrete price tag on an abstract warning: MIT Technology Review argued that [[a:949221|obsessive documentation of life online makes it nearly impossible for young people to shed past identities]]. Read alongside campus practices like Syracuse tracking students' phones for attendance, the signal to applicants is that evaluation begins before enrollment and never really stops.
First-order effects
- For applicants, disclosure becomes a calculated risk: posting openly about mental health or body positivity can now be held against them in admissions, pushing candid expression toward alt accounts — the exact workaround commentator Christina Warren flagged in response to the story.
- Admissions offices effectively add a free screening layer on top of transcripts, formalizing behavior the companion reporting says hiring managers are already exhibiting toward young candidates.
Second-order effects
- Vendors selling applicant-ranking services to universities have ready-made infrastructure to extend into social-media scoring, pressuring schools without such contracts to buy in just to stay comparable in yield management.
- Gen Z applicants shift behavior platform-side: locked profiles, finstas, and scrubbing tools become standard pre-application hygiene, which degrades the open public feed that platforms like TikTok depend on for authentic teen content.
Third-order effects
- If screening at the gate normalizes, surveillance follows students through the whole pipeline — the Syracuse phone-tracking case shows the next stage — further desensitizing a generation to continuous institutional evaluation, the outcome the 2019 reporting explicitly worried about.
- Mental-health disclosure turns into a structural liability in every gatekept process (admissions, hiring), punishing exactly the openness that public-health messaging tells young people to practice.
The trend: Gatekeepers of opportunity are converting public social feeds into informal background checks, making Gen Z's digital footprint a standing input to admissions and hiring decisions.