So much of the university admissions process now unfolds online. Students use online platforms to research schools – and they leave digital footprints across the internet, often without even realising.
For international students, online activity can carry additional weight in the current political climate. A number of cases have emerged in which student visas were revoked, partly because of social media activity, including posts made years earlier.
In fact, the US State Department now requires all student visa applicants to set their social media profiles to public for government review – meaning that for students bound for the US, keeping accounts private is not enough. A public profile is a legal document in ways it simply was not a few years ago.
Counsellors should encourage international applicants to review not just their own posts but content they have liked, shared or commented on: interactions that might seem mundane to them but which can be just as risky as their own posts. It is worth having a frank conversation with students about the pragmatic difference between keeping political views off public platforms during a vulnerable period in the immigration process and self-censorship out of fear.
Social media: part of the university-application process
More broadly, we must help students understand that their online presence is not a passive thing. It can be an extension of their application, which operates outside the formal structure of essays and recommendations. It’s important for counsellors to see social media as a serious aspect of their job, to effectively counsel their Gen Z applicants.
Step one is having an honest, early conversation with students about what their public profiles communicate. A quick scroll through a student’s Instagram or TikTok can tell a very different story from the one they carefully craft in their personal statement. The student who writes compellingly about their commitment to community service but whose public feed is full of content that contradicts that – whether through inflammatory commentary, evidence of rule-breaking or simply a tone that reads as indifferent or unkind – can cast doubt on their genuineness. Admissions offices might not often conduct formal social media sweeps but screenshots can travel. And in an era of declining admissions rates, anything that introduces ambiguity about a student’s character is a liability.
The practical guidance here is straightforward: we should encourage students to audit their digital presence from junior year (year 12). That means Googling their own name, reviewing tagged photos and posts going back several years and switching personal accounts to private for the duration of the application cycle.
It also means thinking carefully about what they continue to post during senior year (year 13) itself – a period when some students get caught up in the drama of college decisions and post things in moments of frustration or excitement that they would not want a stranger – or, worse, an admissions officer – reading.
Curating a public profile
This is not about stifling a student’s personality – it’s about intentionality. What is publicly visible should genuinely reflect who students are.
A well-maintained LinkedIn profile listing their internship experience or published research, for example, can quietly reinforce what their application says. For artists, creating their own website with their portfolio or a YouTube channel with clips of performances can be an excellent option. The goal is coherence: a consistent picture across every platform for anyone reviewing their application to see.
Student athletes need to adopt a slightly different mindset. While most students are advised to pull back from public social media accounts, athletes need to step forward because, for them, visibility is a strategy for recruitment when it is executed with purpose.
Student athletes: building a digital profile
Encourage recruitable athletes to build a public-facing athletic profile early, ideally by the end of sophomore year (year 11). And advise them to treat it as a professional tool rather than a personal feed. A dedicated Instagram account focused on training clips, competition highlights and engagement with college programmes they’re genuinely interested in, following team accounts, commenting thoughtfully, tagging relevant coaches or programmes, signals seriousness.
Beyond social media, platforms such as Next College Student Athlete allow athletes to build structured recruiting profiles – including stats, videos, academic records and contact information – that make them more easily discoverable. These are essential, not optional extras, for students with Division 1 ambitions.
Keeping your personal life private
The key distinction to communicate to these students is the difference between a curated public profile and an unmanaged personal one. All students can and should keep their personal life private. The athletic or artistic profiles they build are professional documents, and that is what they should look like.
Ultimately, the underlying message all our students should walk away with is the same: the college admissions process rewards intentionality. Students who take ownership of their digital presence – whether by cleaning up what exists or by building something new – are practising exactly the kind of self-awareness that strong applicants demonstrate everywhere else in their material.
