We recently covered that discovery that a University of Pennsylvania admissions officer mocked applicants on Facebook.

Dartmouth College student Luke Decker offers his thoughts on the incident, and how  today’s social media impacts student expectations of privacy.

My social media accounts have begun to pick up on an interesting trend. I see tweets along the lines of, “Today Student X said such and such,” Instagram photos depicting a ridiculous answer to a test question and Facebook posts flooded with comments on how weird it is to be called by your last name. These posts force me to take a step back and think, “Wait, did Student X give you the permission to make that public?”

The notion of just how private the things we perceive as private are has come into question within the last week, with news that a former University of Pennsylvania admissions officer had, through a series of posts on Facebook, mocked the personal stories shared in admissions essays. According to The Daily Pennsylvanian, the officer quoted one applicant who was terrified of using the bathroom outdoors while camping in the wilderness and commented, “Another gem.” The posts were picked up by an anonymous user on College Confidential and made even more publicly accessible.

Social media has become a pressure valve for people’s daily lives, taking the shape of an informal space for anyone to share anything. But unlike a discussion with a friend over coffee, sharing a student’s daily life over the Internet is risky — information is forever publicly available, at least in some capacity. Once on the Internet, its distribution for further public consumption is beyond the initial Facebook user’s control….

This raises the question of whether educators and admissions officers should be able to share information about students on their personal social media accounts. I argue that they should not.

Decker wants Dartmouth to learn from the experiences at Pennsylvania school.

In The Daily Pennsylvanian, former Dartmouth College admissions officer Michele Hernandez acknowledged instances when applicants’ personal details had “slipped through the cracks.” Dartmouth’s admissions office needs to take the lead in developing a privacy policy of some kind for applicants to ensure that they will continue feeling comfortable sharing personal stories.

There is simply no downside to the existing policy of limiting admissions officers’ activity on their social media outlets — it is the price of keeping prospective students “real” when applying to college.