Universities should resist advertising on social media

You might drive past one every day, you might see a freshly printed picture of one in the newspaper you read or you might even attend one — a school. We regularly associate schools with picturesque buildings, rows of students with their heads studiously bent, centers of education and intellectual betterment. The students supposedly attend classes at their schools to learn about the world around them and pursue their passions.

Now, let’s flip our customary definition of school. These universities work tooth and nail to promote themselves on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat.

As a millennial in every sense of the word, I often use these sites to get a glimpse at the widely different lives that my friends from around the world are leading and to get updates on frivolities like celebrity vacations. To me, there has never been anything intellectually mystifying or grand about these platforms.

When high schools and universities around me started using this approach to reach out, I was confused by their methods. Now, I am appalled by these schools’ unconcealed actions to promote themselves and mystified by their approach. Consequently, I am wary of my own presence on the internet because of the potential interference by academia.

One of the most important aspects of social media use by educational institutions is its purpose. The overarching aim is to sell their school so that children will attend and parents or alumni will donate. Even before they began using Facebook and Twitter, schools sent letters to alumni and advertised themselves in newspapers and magazines. They continue to do so, but who reads printed newspapers nowadays? The answer: Only people of “a certain age.”

Though fewer and fewer people use paper source material in the present day, we know that the people deciding where their children go to school are parents, not children. As of 2015, 90 percent of people from ages 18 to 29 use social media, according to the Pew Research Center. This portion of the population may very well see what schools — often their own schools — post on the sites they use. However, their potential appreciation of what these schools post has little to no influence on who will actually enroll.

Alex Silberzweig is a freshman Writing Seminars and Economics double major from New York.