You Heard What?!

How college students are actively participating on Facebook today

—By Elizabeth Weiland

Facebook is now known as a “dying” network as newer, more trendy sites such as Instagram, Twitter, and Tumblr become more popular. Despite its subpar reputation, Facebook still maintains a presence on college campuses, through private and public groups and pages. Students have been able to use these groups as a way to connect with other students, events, and clubs, etc. to help them transition into college. Often portrayed as a generic social networking site, Facebook is instead expanding into an outlet for expression, communication, and connections across campus. But you have to be on the right page.

A quick search for the University’s name on Facebook will lead to an official public page for the University of Michigan. The page promotes a narrative of academic success, prospering students, and a welcoming environment through movie-like production videos, admission-based posts, reviews from alumni, and even their mission statement. But this informational portrayal is surprisingly unpopular with actual users as the page has over 780,000 likes but minimal interaction with content, even with their linked official groups for parents and students.

So where are students connecting? Unofficial college-oriented public and private groups. Outside of the picture-perfect university showcased on official pages, these Facebook groups allow students to interact together and further campus culture overall in a less-formal setting. Serving as a counter perspective, current students can be seen interacting on different groups that do not reflect the seemingly ghostly presence of The University of Michigan’s official page, such as “University of Michigan Class of 2021”, “Barstool Blue”, “Overheard at Umich”, and more.

• University of Michigan Class of 2021: This group is presented as a closed group available to current or prospective students on campus as a source for connection and is aimed for a specific graduating class. With over 11,000 members and no “rules,” it has become a source to find roommates/housing, promote events, sell tickets, and ask common questions. After being approved to join, it allows for a space of discussion, in a more serious light but is not officially affiliated with the University of Michigan as it is a student-run group. Since this is an unofficial outlet, there is more activity on a daily basis through posts, pictures, and event sharing, with the site averaging over 1,100 posts per month. Despite the abundance of ads for people selling subleases for housing and parking, trading various tickets, or promoting student organization events, and even random funny posts like desperate pleas for people to drop a waitlisted class, the site is still beneficial to students in many ways by allowing them to connect with others on campus. Emily Mangutz, a current sophomore, uses the site to interact with other students and says that “sometimes the people I get to talk to have mutual friends with me, which makes it easier to make more connections and builds on the web of people I know.” Pages like “University of Michigan Class of 2021” and other “class” pages allow students to create a bigger community outside of just Facebook here at Michigan.

• Barstool Blue: In contrast, “Barstool Blue” is a public page directly affiliated with the company Barstool Sports, presenting a perspective run by outside and inside sources around campus. This page covers the latest news, typically in relation to sports and viral highlights while aiming for lots of reactions from Facebook users. Our university’s page shares things like embarrassing episodes of binge drinking or cute dogs in Michigan gear, crazy game day spirit during campus rivalry weeks and more certainly the best plays or disses towards the other team from the latest game. This sports and pop culture blog promotes followers to be active participants on their other media outlets as well, modeling more of an advertisement rather than a community, representing the University of Michigan experience. With a witty attitude, “It is a funny resource for students that is mostly centered around people who enjoy the social life and sports of the University of Michigan” says current Engineering student, Brandon Burzlaff. Since, “Barstool Blue” is a page rather than a group students cannot join a group for collective humor but instead are limited to simply interacting with the page. Although, not only admins can post on the site, students can be more involved with the page by submitting their own featured photos or videos in hopes to get reposted rather than just following the page. This Facebook page still showcases a community-like appeal, without being a group, because it still helps group together students through humor, resulting in more interaction than the regular official pages.

• Overheard at Umich: This is a popular public group made for current students to get a quick laugh and instantly react and interact with other students across campus. Described as being more of a meme page, the communicative humor expresses an outlet from the most stressful parts of university life. The page is defined by its administrators as a center to “experience the Michigan difference by posting/reading overheard conversations or images,” With over eleven thousand members and counting, the group gives students an opportunity to embark in instant humor that can be experienced without a “filter”. These can include but are certainly not limited to comments about classes like “A lot of Michigan classes are curved so that their main goal is to hurt you. They keep hurting me mom”, dramatic interactions like “Overseen: a girl breaking up with her boyfriend in the Ugli last night – a pretty ugli way to end a relationship”, and just weird posts like quoting commentary of someone screaming “HI DADDY SCHILSS” outside of the president’s house.. Current student Lauren Harris says “posting anything online can be scary, especially knowing that anyone— like future employers—can look you up and see what you are doing, saying, really anything at all,” but the Overheard trend is quite common. According to, Jesse Margolis, founder of the Overheard brand tells Beyond the Interview that these “submissions reflect what is trending in culture with a hint of organic culture” which diversifies the role of Facebook as it makes it more humanistic. This allows for a place where students can show more emotion and invest time in a closer peer group rather than just provide a serious, business like profile of themselves.

So why are “unofficial” sites like these popular? Research states that the “main reason [people] join Facebook…is to keep in touch with old friends and to strengthen a bond with colleagues” creating an outlet of investments for relationships, friendships and more; so where do students find this type of community on Facebook? Moreover, “students’ sense of integration within and support from their college community is an essential competition to future success at the institution…[through] support from social connection and interaction” with peers (Gray, Vitak, Easton, Ellison). By giving students specific groups to interact within, representative of their student status at the University of Michigan, they are able to interact online their peers daily without even meeting them in-person before giving the “dying” platform new life. Commonly, students will continue to look for more ways to get more integrating on campus.

The evolution of technology has allowed social networks, such as Facebook, to flourish and become a place for multiple aspects of society such as aspiring businesses, families, friendships, relationships, and of course lots of drama. As we transition into a society and college atmosphere where everything we do can be reflected online, pages like “Overheard at Umich”, “Barstool Blue”, and the “University of Michigan Class of 2021” have the ability to reach thousands of students every minute and connect us with anyone on campus. College students are actively debunking the theory that Facebook is a “dying” trend among the social networking outlets. So, what will you hear on campus today?

Feature photo credit: Facebook Focus in Class, by Elizabeth Weiland