As housing officials at colleges around the country send out roommate assignments to freshmen this summer, a growing number of schools say they’re getting more requests for changes â?? from parents who don’t like the roommates’ Facebook profiles.
“They were getting an impression â?? false or accurate â?? of what the student would be like to live with,” says Magda Manetas of The College of New Jersey in Ewing.
Administrators at some schools have begun to talk to students and parents in advance about the tendency to look up roommates online. Paul Evans of the University of Wisconsin-Madison now includes a statement about social-networking sites in orientation literature for first-year students.
“It can be a problem, and we’re just trying to warn people about taking everything that they see on there as fact,” he says.