Lately a lot of people have been asking about the potential downside of using blogs to market their institution or businesses. They are overwhelmingly alarmed about comments that may be derogatory or countering the marketing messages that they're putting on the website or blogs. What should they do?
Well there are two answers. Firstly have a blog but don't allow comments or allow comments only after approvals. This means that you're in control of what message goes public and by extension what your audience sees/reads. This addresses the concern but throws up more problems - in my opinion more damaging - for your users. By following this line your users are basically invited to comment but are restricted to what you wish to allow them to do. The relationship is one-sided. Even readers who are not commenting are presented with a mediated set of content. Eventually, this becomes transparent and counter-productive. So this works but is not what I'd recommend.
The second answer is to allow all comments. What your audience expects now is the chance to interact with you or your institution. Allowing them to do so gives you the chance to address any negative comments and to start a dialogue. Obviously you're not going to be able to deal with all people through this approach, but hey, you can always reserve the right to disallow commenting rights to obvious crazies, offensive post and so on. What you do get is the reality of a genuine area where relationships are built up and managed. The casual reader sees that you are concerned with what they think of your services or offers and will be drawn into the debate.
So there you have my answer. Obviously you need to put resource into managing the blog, but you'd do that anyway with such a potentially valuable communications channel wouldn't you? Maybe you'd need to get some of your students to work on it, and incentivise them.
But the biggest effort then is to deliver on the end product - what will the student experience once they buy into your blog and come to study with you? After that would they be happy to post on it?
Crack that and you have the perfect PR channel!