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A growing number of top-ranked U.S. colleges say they are finding objectionable material online that hurts the chances of prospective freshmen.

bout a quarter of admissions officers at the nation's top 500 colleges have used websites such as Facebook and Google to vet applicants, according to an annual Kaplan Test Prep survey. Of those, more than one-third say they have found something that has hurt a student's chance of admission, up from 12% last year.

According to a 2008 Kaplan study, one in 10 college admissions officers routinely check out college applicants’ Facebook and MySpace pages. And some 38% of them found posts and pictures that reflected poorly on those prospective students. It wasn’t even necessarily that they’d posted provocative or hard partying photos. In some cases, students had simply written disparagingly about the campuses they toured.