Not everyone has seen them. I haven’t. When I was in college, the only dorm decoration I did was installing shelves in to the wall. I can’t recall my roommates doing anything more extensive than putting up posters. I also can’t recall seeing any extensive decoration in anyone else’s dorm room besides preparation for special events, such as parties. Maybe things have changed from when I was in college, or it’s primarily SEC/football colleges like you suggest?
I also can’t recall income disparities ever being a significant issue among my roommates or the group I hung out with. I didn’t discuss their parent’s income, and wasn’t concerned about their parent’s income. It’s rare that I had any thought towards their parents. We also rarely did any kind of pay high fee to play type activities, such as “last minute $5000 weekend to NYC.” Perhaps it relates to which group you choose to hang out with. I doubt that I’d get along well with someone who wanted to go to NYC for the weekend and encouraged me to spend thousands of $ on the trip.
This is surely not the only factor, but I am very convinced the rise of certain sorts of social media has, in certain social circles, fueled the rise of the expensively-decorated dorm room.
Honestly, the practical adult in me often looks at one of those pictures/videos and thinks, “You are 100% going to die in a fire.” But I do get it, you have this confined space, somewhere in the middle of the scale between full house and doll house, and you can use that to express your idea of a fantasy decor.
All that said, I do very much think this is not a universal concept, meaning that nowhere close to every kid in college whose family could afford to build them a frou-frou firetrap is actually doing so. But again thanks to social media, it can at least feel pretty common in certain specific social circles.
But even without elaborately decorated rooms, one student could offer to bring one thing (rug) and suggest that you bring another (ie mini-fridge), and it might be beyond your budget.
Going forward, it could be the cost of ordering in pizza or a case of beer. Sure, not a lot of $ and doable once or twice on a tight budget, but quite possibly not affordable on a regular basis.
Imho, the differences are tougher not between the extremes but among groups who appear closer. I recall being FP (because my parents had saved for our education) and not having the spending $ my friends did (because my savings from work went to books). I definitely couldn’t do everything with them - because all those small expenditures would have left me dry by Thanksgiving. And it WAS hard saying no. Moving a breakfast meet-up ftom the local diner to a dining hall, for example, was essential!
I must admit that I was the decorating outlier in my dorm in the late 70s. Most of the rooms were furnished with bean bag chairs, stereos, milk crate bookcases, posters, hanging plants in knotted beige macrame holders, and a melting candle stuck in a bottle of Mateus on the windowsill next to the marijuana plants. And, in a few weeks, the rooms were strewn with clothes and filthy.
Not for me. I spent the first day* on campus painting my single a fresh white with leftover paint from home (most of the rooms had a dark accent wall that I didn’t like). I scrubbed the floor (weekly) and hung tie-back curtains I had made from extra sheets that matched my pretty bedding. I also had a large, fluffy white shag rug with a no-shoes rule. Total cost was the price of the sheets which my mother bought for me new freshman year.
*I started school in January and roomed with my HS BF that first semester. It was living with her that showed me what not to do going forward. I was also on full scholarship and had no money for extras or eating out but at least I had a nice clean, peaceful room.
ETA: Several years ago, we had a thread on food insecurity among college students where I posted that I lived on 13 meals a week (lunch/dinner M-Sat, brunch on Sunday, no breakfast service in my dorm). I had no money for outside food, so I lived on that and didn’t think anything of it, but I was often hungry. And very thin.
I actually could not afford to come home for Thanksgiving sophomore year, and a contributing factor was basically a little too much cheap beer and cheap pizza. I had joined a new team activity and made a lot new friends, and I didn’t want to not be a part of the social aspects of being on that team. And yes, I think this struck some of my friends as surprising, but they just didn’t know the sorts of tradeoffs I was facing with my budget.
Incidentally, I sort of solved this problem by more or less not buying books going forward. Again, tradeoffs . . . .
Edit: Oh, but meanwhile my parents were covering all tuition and fees, and on campus housing and dining, for all four years, with a condition being I was not allowed to work during college terms, just breaks. So I definitely did not think of myself as being a particularly hard luck student, just within the normal range.
I mentioned in our classof2024 thread that I’m worried about my daughter not saving enough of her summer job money to adequately cover her spending money needs for next year. I can see her making this same choice
Back then I usually made it work thanks to the library, although a couple times I was not using the latest edition of something. I suspect there are a few people out there who still have a vague memory of some kid in their class who kept leaning over and asking them things like, “Page 224 . . . what chapter and section is that?”
Beer and pizza money came in the form of volunteering for psychology and other campus funded experiments freshmen year. The medical school paid the best, but some of those studies were invasive. Just worked in the dining halls starting sophomore year, easy money for me after having worked in a commercial kitchen. My friend group were all middle class, so the big fight was Schaeffer vs Michelob.
I too was unable to afford the trip home for Thanksgiving. And I didn’t consider myself underprivileged, just underfunded! (And a buyer of used books.)
But the difficulty was that each spending decision needed to be made in that moment. So today, if I really wanted to hang with my friends at a concert, I was making that decision without knowing that 2 months from now what other spending would come up. Of course, some part of this goes on for the rest of our lives – my guess is we’ve all been out to dinner with the person who orders really expensive wine and then splits the bill while we all marvel at how much our evening together cost!
So yes, our kids need to figure out how to manage this, hopefully without completely avoiding others with different budgets.
My husband (who lived on a sun porch) did those experiments! My youngest daughter tried donating plasma, but after an infection the 3rd time, was asked to not donate (her blood was too slow). Too bad, it was good money.
I know that it’s difficult to be hands-off, but the perfect time to start is when our kids go off to college. We’ve had 17 or 18 years to help them become the young adults they are. We can listen to their concerns, offer advice when asked for it, and keep our worries to ourselves. Income disparities and dorm decorations are things that our children are perfectly capable of navigating without us getting involved, and nothing horrible will happen to them if they have to struggle with it a bit.
D had friends of varying incomes in college. One of them had her join the family in a private plane to go skiing and wear clothes of his mom or sister (designer brands). They stayed with family at family condo and had a lovely time. They had to fly back on commercial plane to return to school. They wouldn’t let her pay for anything.
The friend often had them dine out on family credit card. He loved sushi and let her pay for parking while he paid for the very nice restaurants.
She had another friend who was literally a trust fund baby and also took her skiing. Again nearly everything was covered of their ski adventure.
The rest of the time D is just fine and normal. She did enjoy the different perspectives of these friends but she and they understood they were working with different resources.
I would advise my kids to find a group more in line with their means. Honestly that’s what my kids did who attended schools with the uber-wealthy and famous. I mean we are wealthy but not, my dad owns a professional sports team wealthy, or my family owns the most famous cosmetics brand in the US, or my dad is a former President of the United States who has written best selling books and makes a fortune on speaking engagements wealthy, or my dad is the rock and star my parents revere wealthy. Those of the kind of kids my kids went to school with. They never expected to be part of those worlds (though the former President’s kid had the most diverse group of friends)
D had a diverse group of friends and still does to this day. She’s closest to her HS friends though. They’ve been friends for about 20 years! She found it fascinating to get to know many different people as part of her college journey. She sbd we have no regrets.
Her HS friend group was the most diverse and inclusive in campus. I think it’s a strength to be able to be comfortable with lots of different people.
Socioeconomically speaking, my D has a pretty diverse college friend group, and she lands somewhere in the middle. The income disparity is generally not an issue, and the activities that the group chooses as a group are accessible to all. Yes, some people in the friend group take fancier vacations or have cars on campus (new ones), but the vacations are family trips and don’t exclude anyone, and the cars are helpful for everyone in the group (road trips, errands, picking each other up from the airport, etc.). Dorm decor is not really an issue – no one goes all out in that respect. It just takes kindness and inclusiveness to make sure no one feels marginalized. If a group of friends can’t handle kindness and sensitivity to socioeconomic difference, then it’s time for new friends.
I have one kid whose friends are mostly close to her in terms of economic circumstances. My other one had a much more diverse group but she was closer to the top. She chose to live with a friend senior year in an apartment I found sort of disgusting, but it was where her friend could afford to live. But the friend’s family also lived just 30 minutes away and she would take her laundry home on weekends because she like my daughter did not feel comfortable using the building laundry which was in a dark basement which WAS NOT LOCKED TO THE PUBLIC! We made our kid use a laundry service which we paid for. When she called to set it up, they told here they could do it but “we’ve never been to that building before”
Seems like this kind of thing comes up because SES diversity in college is usually greater than in most high schools, which often serve smaller less SES diverse areas.
Instruct your child to ASK before committing to an event, dinner, concert, etc. If the group is talking about going to the beach for the weekend, ask what the cost will be, will they be splitting everything evenly (then DON’T go because someone will run up the drinks and food bills), if they go to a concert will they be staying overnight, will they be buying a VIP ticket?
Most schools have limited the outfits for sorority rush and give everyone a series of t-shirts to wear each day. They also publish the costs to join a sorority (and they do vary, even at the same school). It is still possible to get into a spending war with t-shirts for every event, events, gifts for Big Sis/Little Sis, etc. but that is going to depend on the house and the school. For one daughter it was cheaper for her to live in the sorority (room, board, dues) than the dorm (room and board). Their student IDs got them into everything for free (even football), some group or another always gave away a t-shirt for a football or basketball game, etc. She was the stereotypical poor college student and she was in a sorority. She never went to spring break in Mexico.
She was assigned a roommate just days before she moved into the dorm, and the ‘new’ roommate had all kinds of ideas of decorating and who should bring what. Too late! We were already on the way and we’d backed what we’d packed. Their stuff didn’t match, they were both kind of slobs, the other girl brought a microwave and ‘assigned’ my daughter to bring the mini-fridge, which she ended up getting for $25 at the big yard sale they have about 2 weeks after school starts from all the stuff abandoned by last year’s students.
It all works out.
I happened to have a roommate who came from a ‘comfortable’ family. Her father put a set amount in her account every semester, paid her sorority bill (and later rent), and her mother sent her a $20 bill every Monday which arrived every Tuesday. She also had a card for gas and if she needed anything she just had to ask. She had the stereo, a record collection to die for, a sewing machine, plates, cookware. She had a car and a motorcycle. I had nothing. I was very appreciative when her mother showed up occasionally with a bag of groceries that always included toilet paper and home made cookies.
