Beisel's got a good post on managing personal identity...  or if nothing else just being conscious of it.

This is something that is becoming more and more important for college students, for two reasons. 

The fact that they have so little experience means that the risk they take with a poorly managed digital identity is huge, and at the same time, it represents a tremendous opportunity.

So, if the only thing you get when you Google a student is a quote given to the school paper for an article on the legalization of marijuana, that student's resume is going to get bounced from the pile pretty quickly.

However, what about if what comes up in Google is a well-written blog about being a student studying finance or psychology or whatever the student is into?  How quickly would that resume move up the pile?  It might even make up for the lack of internship experience, particularly if its insightful enough.

Schools need to be teaching students how to manage their online identities, and not just "Don't show your thong on MySpace", but "Here's how to use your MySpace account or a blog or LinkedIn to get a great job."

The problem is, if all your professors are PhDs who have been teaching for 25 years, how many people out there have enough expertise to actually teach something about this?  I don't think the pool of college professors who blog who have actually seen a MySpace page is very large...  let alone those who have interest in showing how this could apply to career advancement.

On that note, tonight is the first "Intro to Business Blogging" class at Fordham's Graduate School of Business.  Its a class I taught last summer. 

So if there are any forward thinking colleges in the NYC who think this is something their undergraduate students could benefit from, I've yet to book myself for a fall teaching position at night and would be more than happy to explore opportunities.  The criteria is that your school has to be flexible and forward thinking enough to realize that a secondary degree does not necessarily make someone qualified to teach digital career advancement and identity management to undergrads.