Despite years of news reports about people getting fired over their Facebook and MySpace pages, it seems college students still don’t know the risks of social networking.

The news media has been pretty good about jumping on this issue, highlighting many extreme cases in which otherwise qualified job applicants have lost job opportunities because of their online profiles. In an April 2008 article in The Washington Post, a reporter described the ease of finding young D.C. schoolteachers with public Facebook profiles containing drinking photos, crude sexual references and otherwise unprofessional behavior.

Search through the ASU network on Facebook and you’ll find plenty of people with fully public profiles.

An online profile like Facebook, MySpace or Twitter can be a small indication of one’s personal life. And what do employers expect when it comes to the personal life of a college student? It probably depends on your work — some might care a lot — but the statistics are pretty clear about our demographic.

About 80 percent of students at four-year colleges consumed alcohol in 2001 — a number that was reasonably consistent throughout the 1990s, according to a 14-year study by the Harvard School of Public Health.

To be clear, this is equivalent to about 50,000 ASU students who have been drinking this year.

And more than 40 percent of college freshmen and sophomores — two groups likely to be under 21, were binge drinking in 2001, according to the study. This study is a bit old, but these are probably the most reliable numbers available.

According to a 2006 Monitoring the Future survey, 19.5 percent of the college-student population uses illegal drugs like marijuana and cocaine every month — think more than 10,000 ASU students.

It’s not unreasonable to assume plenty of this behavior, especially the boozing, is documented on Facebook and other social-media sites.

Frankly, debating the ethics of alcohol and drug use isn’t helpful to this problem; the numbers are too big. The vast majority of college students are using alcohol and/or illicit drugs, and some have incriminating evidence publicly accessible online, a potential threat to their jobs and career paths.

Aside from photos of you partying, petty things like your stated political opinions could potentially influence your likelihood of employment.

And even if you’re careful about what you post, much of the content on any social media site isn’t even generated by you. On Facebook, for example, your tagged photos, wall posts, comments, etc. are often posted by friends.

While I’d like to see more students take accountability and ensure their own privacy, I don’t think that’s going to happen without increased education. ASU 101, for instance, could teach freshmen how to avoid getting fired over an online profile.

And the good people at Facebook could make full privacy the default setting for everyone’s profile. Currently, anyone who joins Facebook gets a profile that is, by default, viewable by all of their networks (likely thousands of people).

So for now, check your privacy settings and advise your friends to do the same. Hopefully, Michael Phelps will help raise awareness about all these risks with his now-infamous bong photo.

Reach Matt at matt.culbertson@asu.edu.