What to Know About College Admissions Forums
High school counselors are understaffed and overworked, and independent education counselors can be costly. That means students are often on their own with college admissions questions, but increasingly more are turning to internet forums for answers.
Forums such as Reddit and Quora are often where students go with a variety of questions about all things admissions.
"Prospective and admitted college students are the main users gravitating towards these platforms," says Steve App, business development manager at Wisconsin-based Campus Sonar, which conducts social media research and audience analysis for colleges.
"They are using it to get help with building out college lists. They're asking for advice, and also just an opinion on if they're going to get into their dream school, their top school or safety schools with their test scores, their GPAs and extracurriculars. And then they're looking to these forums as well for help on choosing colleges."
[See: 10 Steps to Choosing the Right College.]
Reddit, notes App, is the sixth most-visited website in the U.S. A subreddit, R/ApplyingToCollege, has more than 143,000 subscribers. According to analytics website Alexa.com, Reddit ranks No. 18 in global internet engagement; Quora comes in at No. 226 as of publication.
"I think (Reddit is) a place where people can commiserate and connect with each other over some of the challenges, or some of the other issues they're dealing with related to college admissions," says Mark Boerckel, co-founder and vice president of Better College Apps in South Carolina and an active Reddit user. Boerckel often offers up college admissions advice as u/ScholarGrade on Reddit.
How College Admissions Forums Work
Both Reddit and Quora are free and easy to sign up for, but they differ slightly in terms of functionality.
Reddit, for example, functions more like a traditional message board. Users can join subreddits -- boards within the website that function as communities with varying sets of rules -- to engage others in discussions about topics of interest. Posting rules and ability vary for nonmembers, but being a member will push that content into the user's homepage Reddit feed.
Subreddits can be broad -- like R/ApplyingToCollege -- or more specific, such as R/chanceme, where students post their academic resumes, seeking feedback from other users on their odds of admission to particular schools based on the details shared.
School-specific subreddits also offer additional insight. Boerckel says those forums are often populated by current college students who can answer questions about their university, such as their own admissions experience, campus life and other relevant topics.
Similar to subreddits, Quora has topic-focused "Spaces" that a user can follow. Those topics then appear in the user's feed. Users can add questions and select the topics that are relevant, which populates that query into those specific feeds for others to answer.
Both websites offer the ability to ask questions anonymously, though Quora requires users to sign up under their real name.
Finding Trustworthy Advice on Admissions Forums
Reddit and Quora also offer users the ability to vote up or down on a post, elevating content those communities find worthwhile.
It's that self-policing that makes the information fairly trustworthy, Boerckel says, drawing from his experience on Reddit.
"Every comment and every post is subject to Reddit's voting system," Boerckel notes. "Things that are inaccurate or just out of touch are going to get filtered down to the bottom, and the content that is the most relevant, the most correct, the most well supported and detailed usually gets voted up."
But that doesn't mean all college advice on these forums is accurate about specific colleges or admissions in general.
"Every once in a while you'll see a thread come up where it's a bit of an echo chamber or just the blind leading the blind," Boerckel says, adding that those posts usually get voted down. "Over time, people will generally see information that's more accurate."
Lindsey Conger, a college counselor and tutor at Atlanta-based Moon Prep, has used Reddit and Quora to answer student questions. She urges students to consider the source and the date of the post when assessing credibility.
"Look at the source and look at when it was posted," Conger says, as college admissions has evolved over the years.
She also encourages students to read multiple posts to assess the advice and to look for consistency across answers. "Don't just read one answer and take it as the gospel."
But who is giving all of this advice on college applications and admissions, anyway? On both platforms, independent educational consultants, admissions officers, alumni, parents and current college students form a broad coalition of ad hoc advisers.
[Read: What to Look For When Hiring a College Consultant.]
If users want more information about who is answering a question, that's available. Both sites offer additional context after the username.
On Reddit, students can self-identify, noting their status as a high school senior or college junior, for example. Subreddit moderators can also add labels for verified professionals such as admissions officers or independent educational consultants.
Boerckel notes that students can also click on the user name to reveal post history and more information about the account.
"If you're willing to dig just a little bit, usually you're able to assess (trustworthiness) fairly well," Boerckel says.
Quora has a similar feature, offering the ability to add a description behind the user's name at the top of the post. Students can then click on a user's profile to see a brief bio, post history and other information. Both sites offer the ability to follow individual users.
Even if a source appears valid, App urges students to confirm the information for themselves.
"Even if it's a verified admissions counselor or independent counselor or independent consultant," he says, "I think you need to always verify that information to the best of your ability on the school's website or the more direct communication methods, such as emailing the admissions office to get information."
What Parents Should Know About Admissions Forums
App sees Reddit as a community. But before he began using it, he considered it a "dark corner of the internet."
It first interested him when he read a post from a student suffering from depression who asked other users about mental health resources on campus. Helpful responses poured in, App recalls, and the result seemed more like a conversation among friends than a post to an internet forum.
"I'm finding more and more that prospective and current students who are in college see Reddit as this safe space where they can be more vulnerable about their challenges and their fears through this process," App says. "And a place where they feel like they can get advice and help from people who are aren't going to judge them because they're dealing with the same situation."
While many parents use Reddit to share their admissions experiences, experts say they should also tread lightly in these forums.
"I also think that sometimes parents can just be very out of touch with the admissions world," Boerckel says.
While admissions forums can offer up valuable advice, students also turn to them to let off steam about parental pressures.
[Read: How to Help Your Child Navigate the College Search.]
"We shouldn't forget that this is a really emotional process for prospective college students," App says. "I think oftentimes what they're looking for on Reddit and other forums is just emotional support. They're worried they're not going to get into the schools they want to, they're worried that they're not good enough, they're worried that they're going to make the wrong decision."
Students, he says, are often looking for empathy just as much as they are advice on their college search.
"What they're really looking for is just someone to chime in and offer support and say that they're going to be okay. That it's going to be worth it in the end, that no matter what they're going to get into a school where they can succeed."
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