After being approached by University of Michigan information professor Nicole Ellison, a group of MSU doctoral students began researching the effects of the popular social networking site on high school students hoping to go to college. They received a $100,000 College Knowledge Challenge grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for the project, which began in 2011.

The team surveyed a group of about 500 students from Muskegon, Mich., through questionnaires — and their findings surprised them, doctoral student Yvette Wohn said.

“We were hoping to find that social media is helpful for everyone, and the biggest takeaway was that actually it wasn’t,” Wohn said. “The only students who (it affected) were those with parents who did not graduate from college.”

Among those who would be first-generation college students in their families, the researchers found the students to associate their future college success with the availability of social media. The same trend did not appear in non-first-generation students. Despite the unexpected results, doctoral student Laeeq Khan, also a researcher on the project, said the discovery could serve to help correct a larger social issue.

“The main idea is that we do have inequalities,” Khan said. “Data and research has been formed for a number of years, and these are inequalities that need to be dealt with.”

Wohn said many students whose parents did not go to college tend to feel more nervous about their ability to get into and complete college.

“For these students, they can feel very helpless,” she said. “They’re born into this and don’t have any control of it, and what’s great about this finding is that it shows you can take some control over your life by being active on social media.”

When it comes to reducing anxiety about college, she said the solution comes through social capital, a term used to describe relationships with others.

“We all have resources — some can be financial, and some are social resources or people we know,” she said. “That’s the idea of social capital, that you have resources through the connections with other people.”

On the MSU Office of Admissions side, social media such as Facebook and Twitter have become a tool to engage with students and decrease stress on both sides, Associate Director for Communications Gabe Santi said.

“More than anything, social media is a conversation,” Santi said. “It’s not traditional media, where it’s one way, an advertiser pushing down a message to a recipient and expecting them to sit back and receive that message.”

Given the opportunity to communicate with others before meeting them in person, Khan said Facebook can help first-generation students feel more comfortable with applying to colleges and adjusting to the new experience.

“It’s very interesting to see social media as such a power driver, especially for disadvantaged groups,” he said. “They can use it to give them access to other students coming from better backgrounds, better education. It gives them a sort of level playing field.”