Long past are the days when incoming freshmen could rely on nothing more than campus visits, brief phone calls with an assigned roommate and bloated orientation packets as a means of picturing their future college experience.
In today's Internet-obsessed culture, eager freshmen now have unprecedented access to information--and aren't shying away from using it. During the past several years, sites devoted to connecting college and pre-college students have sprouted up and quickly have gained popularity.
By providing a forum for these students, social networking sites allow users to form bonds before coming to campus, and message boards and chat rooms provide first-hand information about various schools.
Facebook.com, already a recognized staple of campus life, has had epidemic-like success among students who have yet to take their first college class.
"About two-thirds of the Class of 2010 are currently members of the 'Class of 2010' Facebook group," freshman Gwen Gettliffe, the group's creator, wrote in an e-mail. "More and more join every day."
Increasingly, younger high school students are also logging on to sites like College Confidential to get a taste of prospective schools' social environments or to see how their test scores and GPAs hold up against those of other students.
"There's about 60,000 posters on CC, and it's very active," Duke sophomore Michael Moore wrote in an e-mail.
With online college forums increasing in number--the Duke University forum at CC has more than 20,000 posts--it is not surprising that some students said these sources of information are playing bigger roles in both their decisions to apply to and attend Duke.
"I was pretty set on applying to Duke anyway, but it definitely influenced my decision to matriculate," said Moore, who first found the site from a link on his high school's website. "There were several Duke students that posted comments and answered my questions, and it really helped me to decide that Duke was a fit."
Threads on Duke's section of CC run the gamut, with posters asking about anything from the prevalence of tae kwon do to suggestions for scheduling organic chemistry.
"I'd assume once you live on West [Campus] every night is a legit night to party," wrote one poster, "thethoughtprocess," in response to a question about "party nights" at Duke. "[Freshmen] probably end up sticking to Thursday through Saturday since that's when official parties are."
Weather is also a popular topic among high school students curious about North Carolina's fickle climate.
"Our weather can be sporadic, but it's never too unbearable," another poster, "lex," assured applicants.
After the lacrosse scandal broke this spring, anxious high school students and their parents began posting furiously, questioning current students and discussing the unfolding minutiae of the case.
Mirroring the broader public response, CC posters simultaneously criticized and defended the University.
"I know that the recent 'Duke lacrosse' thread on CC was ridiculously long and had many hateful things to say about Duke," a parent of a prospective student--who asked to be identified only by his member name "dajada07"--wrote in an e-mail. "However, cooler heads were also part of the discussion and an intelligent/fair-minded reader would not get influenced by much of the diatribe posted there (both pro and con)."
"Some may come on CC to disparage Duke in the hope that their own schools will displace Duke near the top of the rankings," "dajada07" added.
Though some have questioned the accuracy of information presented by online sources, users of College Confidential and similar sites said they weren't very concerned about the presence of inaccuracies.
"Can one find misinformation in a public discussion forum? Of course. You'll find biased opinions, inaccurate statements and similar issues whenever you have thousands of people posting in a community," CC's co-founder Roger Dooley wrote in an e-mail. "But... large groups of people can often arrive at better conclusions than even expert individuals."
Dooley added that as the success of the site has grown-in the last year and a half, it has accumulated more than 2.5 million posts-he and other administrators have worked to implement safeguards to protect against blatant misinformation.
Still, prospective students often look for more than facts and figures.
Several students said that although they found College Confidential valuable, they flocked to sites like Facebook, MySpace and Xanga because of the social networks they enable.
Gettliffe cited the new Class of 2010 blogging on a Xanga community as an example of how students are getting to know one another during the summer.
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