Youthful indiscretions take on a life of their own when posted on Facebook and other popular corners of cyberspace. University admissions officers can create dossiers of students' extracurricular activities—drunken party photos or off-colour statements—with just a few taps on a keyboard.

Interestingly, U.S. colleges are combing through applicants' social media pages, while Canadian schools say they don't. In a recent survey the National Association for College Admissions in Virginia found that around 25% of U.S. colleges investigate applicants' social media profiles and blogs before offering places or scholarships. Last year, a similar survey by education services company Kaplan Inc. found that 38% of Facebook and MySpace profiles made a negative impression on admissions staff at U.S. colleges, while only 25% made a positive impression.

Joel Curry, director of communications at Grace College in Winona Lake, Ind. said the school's admissions officers "always check online personas. It's part of the communications process to investigate prospective students—it helps to do things like read Facebook to see if they are primarily positive people. This will indicate whether they will be a success here."

But Canadian university applicants can, at least for now, relax. "We'd be crucified by our Senate, or something like that, because at this point we try to be as fair as we can to students," said Dr. Mehran Kiai, director of enrolment at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C. "The selection criteria for admission into universities are, in most cases, based on academic achievement." Canadian law would not allow such an "invasion of privacy," he added.

Sherisse Sy, associate director of student recruitment at University of British Columbia, said: "I attended a few conferences [in the U.S.] where I had heard of that happening. American admissions have a long history of looking at multiple pieces of criteria. But it becomes a very slippery slope when you begin to use that information, because you get to a place where you wonder what qualifies as criteria that would be considered grounds for not admitting a student."