the Sam Jackson College Experience

Yale doesn’t have publicly available admissions OR student blogs, but it does have student-written “Bulldog Blogs” accessible to admitted students. Last year, when I was an admitted student, I discovered that these were actually just ripped from the particular students’ personal blogs and reposted on the admitted students website. I thought about publishing all this information online, but decided against it. Well, a year has gone by, and now I am happy to share at least one of the current batch of Yale blogs–my own!

The Sam Jackson College Experience will soon be beamed to the whole crop of admitted students, in time for the regular decision round. I’m really excited about that level of access to this great audience!

I may be motivated to say more things about Yale since I’ll have a huge increase in Yale-bound readers, but if you feel that I will be tempted to say only good things, think again! I love Yale and have lots to say that I think will help convince people to come join me in New Haven–but I am not planning to skew coverage (you’ll see the same tough angles I have taken in the past) and am not toeing the admission office’s line on anything I don’t believe in. I will have more details for everyone after spring break, but I’m excited!

Let me begin this post by thanking Morgan Davis of Erelevant for a very insightful comment which has once again conjured a response from me which I am reappropriating for the front page. I love the discussions I have with readers, which is why I would encourage more of you to interact a little bit! You might learn something from each other, too. In the past three days, I’ve had visitors from 150+ colleges and universities across the USA and Canada: I see you! Embrace the new web and share your thoughts! I respond to everything.

Now, moving on to the content again… here is the comment Morgan made, excerpted from my recent post”Cornell Student Blogs Crashing and Burning.” The comment is on student blogging generally and why, despite my begging, the world won’t see too many truly honest student blogs blessed and promoted by colleges anytime soon.

“authenticity is more important for good PR than anything else”

Amen.

Authenticity is still really scary for a lot of Admission and PR folks. We don’t use blogs at my school precisely because we know they would have to be *real.* We go out and look at our students MySpace and LiveJournal writings and imagine them with the college logo blazoned across the top. More often than not, we come away scared.

Sure, there’s lots of good stuff too [on MySpace], and even the bad stuff is RELEVANT and AUTHENTIC, but I don’t think many institutions are ready to invite real-life, open discussion of the good and bad in campus culture to their official namespace. And, honestly, the reason is not to fool or deny prospective students at all–it’s parental, donor, administrator, and media opinions that drive these decisions (sad but true).

So the best bet for learning about colleges via blogging will probably remain third-party and personal sites. Officially sanctioned blogs are most likely going to read like viewbooks in first person and without the glossy photos.

I read this and was sad to realize how true it was. So, through my tears of naiveté, I typed up an e-mail response. Here’s that response, lightly edited:

Thanks for the inspiration! I started thinking again about the looming danger of too much of the wrong kind of information about a school. Certainly photos of bong collections and voyeur shots are in vogue when it comes to social networking, but would absolutely not do for a visible school-affiliated blog.

A polished admissions blog might pretend to target the same audience as these great unofficial ones (prospective students, others) but we’re not lambs to the PR slaughter here. High pageviews and visit counts will be a consequence of high profile links to the blogs; plaster them on the main site and all those applicants are going to look at them, whether they derive any value from them or not. If a school was seeking to fill its ranks with witless dupes, then these might be fantastic recruitment paths. To the best of my knowledge, they’re not.

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