Serendipity35

I've been looking into blogs by college students the past few weeks as research before I recommend (or not) that NJIT include sponsored student blogs on its website. This is becoming a fairly common recruiting tool to enable potential students to get student perspectives into life on campus.

There are several good entries by my online friend Karine Joly on her blog about this topic and they led me to look at several student blogs. (Also look at her piece in College Business - "License to Recruit")

For me there is one prominent consideration for a college heading down this path. Do you want to sponsor and control/edit the blogger's entries, or just select students and let them blog what they will?

BLOGS THAT I REVIEWED

• There are a few Pace University blogs listed here but they seem excerpted or infrequently done.
• University of Dayton
• Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
• Clarkson University
• Ball State University
• At St. Thomas in Minnesota they have a slick Flash interface and design to their Tommie Blogs.
• University of Vermont
• I like that the University of Sydney uses several voices in one blog.
• Maine College of Art
• Karine did an entire entry with Sam Jackson, a senior at Phillips Exeter Academy who started to blog in December 2005 about his college search process which has morphed into a blog called The Sam Jackson College Experience. Read her entry to get some background on the why of a blog.
• Oregon State University
• This blog at the Vermont Law School Admissions office is a different take on blogging by a college and the Vermont Law School has several others.
• Ryan Kellett at Middlebury seems to have a strong blog going, complete with Flickr and MySpace elements. Though not obviously about only Middlebury and not aimed at admissions, it does talk about school rankings and admissions issues as well as about college life in general and feels genuine.
• Here's an interesting site called Archinect that collects blogs by architecture students at schools all over the world.

Some of these blogs seem too sporadic to be "true" blogs. Some seem polished to the point of seeming phony and I wonder if they will work for or against college admissions. I think if you look at them you will see a difference between the officially sponsored blogs and the ones students have done on their own. My prejudice for the latter is apparent, but I understand the fear by a university of just letting students go at it.

As with MySpace, YouTube and other sites, blogs will emerge from your school's students whether you sponsor them or not. My feeling is that schools should encourage blogs on their "official" site, select capable student writers. and allow them to be themselves.

Brock Read's Wired Campus blog at The Chronicle brought my attention to another aspect of college blogging that I hadn't considered.

She wonders why students who so love Facebook & IMs haven't taken as much to blogging. She referenced a blog by Erica Strauss at Associated Content where Erica wonders why she can't find "blogs about late-night ramen noodle cram fests and freaking out (not to mention breaking out!) over finals?” The blogs she links to (aimed at women) seem to me far too slick. College Candy is supposedly written by a guy ("Ryan") though it is aimed at women. It's a mostly sex advice blog and it is sponsored by coedmagazine.com. The College Wardrobe seems to be set up to sell products. I don't think any college would want to endorse these blogs as their own.

Brock then asks readers to list their own student blog. I checked the links this past weekend and found a few interesting ones which I included in the list above.

I know that some corporate bigwigs (CEOs & such) have tried blogging and I know that at least one of these bloggers was outed as it turned out that his blog was ghostwritten by someone else at the company.

I wondered if there were any college presidents who were blogging about their school? Here are three I found:

• Wenatchee Valley College President Jim Richardson
• Colorado College President Dick Celeste (listed as "a glimpse a day in the life of our governor/ambassador-turned college president.
• Robert L. Caret has a blog from Towson University.

Who is the audience for these blogs? Current students, potential students, the general public, other college presidents?