By Megan Kenslea
StudentAdvisor.com Staff
Every week StudentAdvisor compiles the top stories in college news. Here are the some of the biggest stories that made the headlines this week:
Occupy Wall Street Movement Hits Colleges
The Occupy Wall Street movement that is sweeping the nation this week has now made its way to college campuses. From schools including Brown, Harvard, Northeastern and SUNY at Purchase, and many others, students frustrated with the national debt, job market, and general state of the economy have taken to the streets to join the movement. "I don’t know anybody who feels secure about their economic future," said Victoria Porell, a Northeastern third year who helped organize her campus walk-out. “Students don’t have lobbyists. We work hard. We pay our taxes. We are the future. Who’s going to look out for our interests other than us? We don’t have anyone else on our side and that’s pretty much been proven.”
Maine Community College Enrollment at its highest ever
Enrollment in the Maine Community College System has increased so much in recent years that thousands of students have been placed on waiting lists this fall, officials say. Since 2003, enrollment has increased by over 83 percent, and this fall, 84 occupational programs at the seven schools in the system are over capacity, system president John Fitzsimmons said. About 1.5 percent of the state population is enrolled in the Community College system, half of the national 3 percent average. "The cloud over the good news is that we’re turning away thousands of good students who want to come in," Fitzsimmons said.
Pictures of Alcohol on Facebook May Signal Larger Problem
Facebook photos of drinking or status updates about alcohol could signify a student has a serious drinking problem, a study published this week found. The Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine published a study this week that found that college students who post photos on Facebook of themselves holding drinks, or post statuses about drinking are four times more likely to develop a drinking problem than those who do not.
The California Department of Education announced this week that 75 percent of all high school graduates in California go to college. Nationally, about 39 percent of high school graduates attend college. A new data tracking system allows the state to cross reference high school graduates with students enrolled in U.S. universities. 50 percent of high school grads move on to in-state public universities. The system does not track the college graduation rate.
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Photo: Bob Jagendorf
By Dean Tsouvalas
StudentAdvisor.com Editor-in-Chief
Did you say social media? Top 100 Colleges? Can you say, “Who ARE the Top 100 Social Media Colleges?” Today we're thrilled to announced the inaugural list of the Top 100 Social Media Colleges – some of the results may surprise you!
So you may be wondering how on earth we came up with this list. The answer? Science, of course! StudentAdvisor's Principle Scientist, Katherine Godfrey, Ph.D., started with a comprehensive list of more than six thousand post-secondary degree-granting U.S.-based institutions. After that we researched Facebook fan pages, Twitter accounts and other social media sites associated with each of those schools.
The team then restricted the rankings to include only those schools that met the following criteria:
- Facebook pages that had at least 500 fans
- Each college had to have at least one Facebook fan page and at least one Twitter account in order to be included in the rankings
- Colleges who could not confirm total enrollment information were removed
To help us evaluate the Twitter account data we partnered up with our friends at HubSpot who are the creators of TwitterGrader.com, a free tool that allows you to check the power of your Twitter profile compared to millions of other users that have been graded. We gave them the list of colleges’ Twitter accounts and they provided the Twitter grades.
The most surprising findings were in the incredibly diverse ways the colleges engage in social media. To arrive at the inaugural list, the data included total Facebook fan counts, total number and effectiveness of Twitter followers among other factors. During the course of the list compilation, the team is regularly re-measuring and updating the data by revisiting the various Facebook, Twitter, and other social media pages.
So what are you waiting for? Go check out the complete Top 100 Social Media Colleges list.
