New Study Says Facebook Use Won't Hurt Grades

By Zack on December 28, 2009

Are you tired of parents and professors telling you that all that time you spend on Facebook and YouTube could be affecting your grades? Well, now you have some data to throw back at them. The Whitmore School of Business at the University of New Hampshire has released a new study on the correlation between social network usage and grades, and found that there isn't much of one (via Inside Higher Ed's Quick Takes).

Grades followed similar distributions for all colleges, with the majority of students earning A's and B's. The study showed that more students use Facebook and YouTube than any other social media platform. Blogs, Twitter, MySpace, and LinkedIn had significantly lower amounts of student users. Students from the business school had the highest percentage of users of blogs, Twitter, and LinkedIn while liberal arts students were the highest percentage of MySpace users.

The researchers studied 1,100 students across a variety of disciplines at UNH and found some other useful findings. Facebook is the most popular social networking site (duh!) with 96% of students surveyed using the site. What's surprising, however, is that only 10% of the students used LinkedIn. Personally, this is a bit disappointing. LinkedIn can be a powerful networking tool for your career, and should be fired up around the time of your first internship as a way to connect with colleagues, and form an evolving record of your employment.

For all of the data, download a summary of the findings here.