100 Social, Mobile and Open Colleges [#Infographic]

The Huffington Post’s Vala Afshar recently looked into which colleges are doing the most to engage students online. As he notes in the excerpt below, colleges’ prospects are high school students, who also happen to be extremely tech savvy. Their expectations of social experiences, mobile-friendly web tools and transparency are pushing colleges to rethink the way they approach not just marketing but also pedagogy. Is the old way good enough? As Afshar explains, the answer is no:

Colleges today are serving the most mobile and social customers in the world, many of whom are using multiple mobile devices to network and collaborate. Today, social networking is the most popular use of the web. A 2012 study noted that students are choosing colleges with social media clout. A survey of 7,000 high school students revealed that university social media accounts influenced their selections.

What are the best U.S. colleges and universities doing to better promote collaboration, aimed at improving the college student experience? To answer this question, I researched US News & World Reports list of the best schools. The 2013 national university rankings identified the top 100 universities in the U.S. I then re-ranked the schools based on their combined Klout and Kred scores - a measure of their engagements across all major social platforms. Not surprisingly, the very best schools are also the most collaborative - see the table below. What does this mean to businesses today? The very best students, graduating from the very best schools, are extremely social and expect transparency and collaboration at all levels of the organization.

The interactive infographic below shows which colleges are the most social, collaborative and transparent. To see a college’s Twitter account, hover over the school logo.