In an attempt to raise or maintain their U.S News & World Report rankings, University admissions departments are enlisting a new pool of individuals to attract top candidates: student bloggers . Universities are hiring their own students to create, update, and upload blogs on their admissions’ pages. Universities are hoping to attract upcoming generations of internet savy high-schoolers to their Universities by giving them a real and uncensored look into the lives of their own students.

The first few blogs I read were quite disappointing, however. These blogs consisted of boring accounts of the bloggers’ daily lives riddled with propaganda for their respective Universities, constantly reminding the viewer that their tuition was well spent. These bloggers don’t drink or party, are never overwhelmed with schoolwork and happily spend more time doing their homework than on Facebook. A Dartmouth student raves: “I have always been really impressed with the spirit of volunteerism at our school!!” These bloggers appear to be modern brochures in disguise and my guess is that they’re not fooling teens.

The last few blogs I read were honest, uncensored, and refreshing. MIT allows student bloggers to upload unvarnished videos directly to its admissions page. Matt McGann , an admissions officer and blogger at MIT notes:

“We see blogs as a way we can say, ‘This is what a university really is.’ There’s some good and some bad. There is no perfect university, so we want to show a little bit of what makes MIT interesting and unique.”

One MIT blogger shows pictures of herself in a tuct taped tube top for an “Anything But Clothes” party. Another blogger shows a video of his dorm room equipped with strobe lights and techno music so that when the “party button” was hit the room would turn into an instant rave. A third blogger detailed herself as growing sick, skinny, and depressed from the stress of finals week.

While parents may raise their eyebrows at the latter group of bloggers, I suspect prospective students would trust a school they think is willing to show them real campus life and feel much more connected to its students. An MIT applicant writes:

“Before I started reading the blogs, MIT was just this thing. Then I saw these real people, people I would be friends with. It makes you feel included, and it made me like the school a whole lot more.”

Looking back, that MIT blog would have absolutely inspired me to apply as a senior in High School (that and another 1,000 points on my SATs).