The best way to get proper testimonies towards how colleges run and safeguard their students is to allow them to blurt out what they want at their own manner of speaking. This is one of the recruitment strategies that colleges such as Ball State University has implemented, giving potential college students of the future an bird’s eye view of what to expect should they consider enrolling at the said university.

Bad and good experiences, the blogging phenomenon has allowed internal insights to set in. The best way to get to know colleges is through the students that are enrolled there. Hence, the blogs are being used as promotional tools at the university home page to have readers look over them initially so that they can relate to the experiences that students of today are truly witnessing.

Here is an excerpt from the Ball State University story:

COLUMBUS – Meet Michael Chandler, a college student who’s had it with parking tickets at Ball State University.

“I swear that’s where most of BSU’s money comes from,” Chandler groused on his blog. “They hand ’em out left and right, without a care in the world.”

Meet the sponsor of Chandler’s blog: Ball State University, which promotes the interactive online diary and several other unfiltered student blogs directly on the university home page as a recruiting tool for prospective students.

Colleges seeking a competitive edge are increasingly enlisting and sometimes paying student bloggers to chronicle their lives online. The results run the gamut from insightful to boring, but the goal is the same: to find a new way to win the attention of the MySpace generation.

“We found it a much freer, less constricting, far more believable way of letting prospective students glimpse what was going on on campus,” said Seth Allen, dean of admissions at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania. – College recruiters turn to blogs

[tags]blog news, blog networks, college blogs, student blogs[/tags]