Guess who's looking at your Facebook page?

• Author: Potenza, Alessandra
• Position: MEDIA

College admissions officers and employers increasingly Google applicants. What they find may not be something you'd like them to see.

She posted her Facebook status update on a Friday night in July. By Monday, she was fired.

At the end of a long day waiting tables at Texas Roadhouse in Findlay, Ohio, Kirsten Kelly complained on Facebook about the small tips she'd received from customers. One happened to be a former schoolmate and a Facebook friend. When the customer saw the post, she printed it out and showed it to Kelly's managers.

"I knew that they could have yelled at me for that," Kelly, 22, told a local TV station. "But I didn't think they could fire me for posting that."

Kelly learned the hard way what young people often don't realize: What you post online can have real consequences. A growing number of employers and college admissions officers Google applicants and scrutinize them on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media sites, where many young people share personal information in what some mistakenly believe is relative privacy.

In a recent survey, over a quarter of admissions officers at hundreds of top-ranked U.S. colleges said they'd used Facebook and Google to vet applicants. Of those, 30 percent said they'd found something online that negatively affected a student's chance of gaining admission, up from 12 percent in 2011, according to the Kaplan Test Prep survey.

Companies and schools have always conducted background checks on applicants. But where once a phone call did the job, now an online search is the norm.

"A Google search of your name is the new handshake," says Dan Schawbel, a social media specialist. "People are already searching for you online even before you meet them in person."

With schools receiving thousands of applications annually, most admissions offices don't have time to check every candidate online. But if something in the application raises a red flag, a Google search is likely to follow.

"We respect the privacy of the students and their online lives," says Paul Marthers, vice president for enrollment at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. "But if there's something that doesn't add up or you feel like you've been tipped off to something, then it's within your purview to check further."

This happens rarely at Rensselaer, to about 15 students out of 15,000 who apply every year. But Web searches have turned up cases of plagiarism, Marthers says. And even accusations of assaults...