I’ve been spending some time recently with Bruce Neimeyer’s 2009 dissertation, An Examination of Native and Immigrant Students’ Social Networking Using the College Search and Selection Process. One of Bruce’s important findings is that immigrant students are more likely to use on-line social network resources and less likely to use direct communication with an admissions office than native students in the course of the college selection process.

I recently had an experience that underscored Bruce’s point and suggested that higher education institutions must not ignore social media if they are interested in recruiting diverse and under-served populations.

I was on-site at one of my clients – a highly prestigious Northeastern private college  – and I met a freshman in a focus group whom I’ll call Manuel. Manuel came from a fairly modest high school in the Los Angeles area. Many students from this high school do not attend college at all, and those who do attend in-state public institutions. Manuel was the exception. One of the best students in the school, he got excited about the prospect of attending a private liberal arts college by a presentation at his school by a Claremont colleges representative.

I was enormously impressed by this young man. Working independently, with little input from family or friends, he assembled a coherent and thoughtful list of selective national liberal arts colleges to which to apply. The list was so good you might have thought he worked with an independent college counselor. But he did not.

None of the schools that Manuel ended up applying to visited his high school. He did attend a college fair at the University of Southern California but much to his disappointment it featured in-state public institutions exclusively. As he firmed up his list, he did become aware that at least one of his colleges was hosting a reception for interested students in his area. But the reception was being held at an exclusive private school and he reasoned that the reception wasn’t targeted at him. Manuel did all of his research while flying under the radar of the schools he was considering. He never met an admissions officer nor visited any of the campuses.

Manuel conducted his research on-line. He said that he found the print materials that the various colleges sent out fairly useless. He also found little of value in the college websites. Neither gave him the information he was seeking. Instead, he focused his attention on 3rd party on-line resources and social media sites such as Unigo. He did tell me that once he settled on the particular college where I met him, he faithfully followed an independent student blog that discussed college events and issues. But he spent little time on the college’s official website.

I think Manuel’s experience holds important lessons for colleges and universities. In trying to reach beyond their traditional communities and attract new more diverse populations, on-line social media platforms are going to be very significant. Truth is, social media platforms are going to be significant for all college bound student recruitment in the future. There are Manuels of every ethnicity and class across this country and around the world. But these resources will be especially important to students who fall outside the traditional pool for private higher education. Colleges that are committed to diverse student communities ignore social media marketing at their peril.