Saw this on CNN- “A new sources of social anxiety for high school seniors: The rise of incoming class Instagram pages” and am curious what other parents think about it.
My child seems a bit stressed out seeing all the posts and not seeing others who are similar to her. She posted but hasn’t much luck in finding people as potential roommates.
Curious what other parents think about this trend. Have your kids had luck with them in finding friends and roommates?
My daughter eliminated the first of her acceptances by this - all anyone talked about was partying. At the same time, they are 17 and trying to look cool.
The reasons she chose the school remain valid so she’ll be ok. Social media has many positives, but for kids developing socially, there are many drawbacks.
Just remind her she picked that school for a reason and she’ll have every chance to make friends.
My son went random. My daughter found kids on line via social media but not sure exactly how but the girl was nothing like she reported herself to be.
Good luck to her.
My D graduated HS in ‘18 so it’s been a while but there were all kinds of FB and Insta pages when she was an incoming freshman and she refused to join. She felt like the girls posting photos of themselves all done up or in bikinis (yes, that was actually a thing) were not “her people”. She went random for roommates and was just fine meeting new people and finding plenty of friends.
My son went random. Never had an issue. Not best friend’s but got along. Also, your daughter will find her peeps if she looks in the right places. Instagram etc isn’t her thing. There are tons of kid’s that it’s not their thing either.
Midd had a semi-official accepted students Instagram. My kid posted a photo of herself in the Midd sweatshirt she got at the Posse White Rose ceremony with a bad pun. I think that most people posted photos of themselves posing with Middlebury stuff. There wasn’t much else about them.
For a roommate, she let the college assign her one, because she has some specific criteria (including food allergies). It wasn’t random - they assigned roommates based on criteria that incoming students gave. She was matched to a girl who was, on paper, pretty similar, including also being Jewish and a dancer (and also having food allergies). They were not very similar, but they did become best friends, and decided that should never, by choice, share a room again.
They did share an apartment for two years though, after graduation, as my kid was gaining research experience, and her friend was getting med-school related experience (and studying for the MCATs).
My kid’s college pages seem to be dominated by girls, many of who post very posed or even professional photos, though there are a number of others posters too (one of whom is likely to be my kid’s roommate). From chatting to some other parents, this seems a common trend among certain colleges at least. One said her daughter didn’t want to post because she clearly wasn’t in the “social league” of those posting and didn’t want to be embarrassed by her photos. Overall I tend to think these pages tend to deter “normal” people from posting. Not sure how you get around this. I think going random for roommates is as good as anything else - D19 went random 2 years and was fine.
It is a bummer some kids are feeling anxious about this, because they don’t have to be. As others have said, many incoming students not engaging with this sort of social media stuff, and going random/school-matched for a roommate is fine.
My kid purposely ignores all of it and really dislikes how fake & contrived all of it appears to be. She’s also said, “That’s stupid” (words straight from the horse’s mouth). BUT she’s a nonconformist at heart & truly does not care if ‘everybody else’ is doing something.
For the heck of it, I took a look at 1 such “Class of 2030” Instagram account that had her college’s name on it. And yeah, I can see why incoming freshmen would get stressed out about that because:
The pics were all…curated to appear a certain way.
An uninformed student COULD come to the conclusion that this means that at College X, EVERYBODY is white, blond, tanned, etc. But in reality, only 50% of the students are Caucasian at D26’s college.
Her college uses the Zeemee mobile app in order to help students make connections (if they want to) before they arrive on campus. Plus, there’s a ‘find a roommate’ search tool that one can use in the student web portal if you want to look for your own roommate ahead of time. The college is pretty open in stating that if you go the route of posting stuff on IG ‘class of 2030’ pages, just know that none of that is sanctioned by the university, so beware about publicly posting a lot of info about yourself online.
It’s kind of nutty, in my opinion, how MANY students are publicly posting so much info about themselves, like:
Almost everything you wrote out is also our experience.
My D26 is not into social media at all- so that helps out a bunch 
The accounts she does have are to just be able to check and follow certain things that can only be found on certain social media sites. Uses as information purposes only kind of thing.
100% this- Make sure your students know that many(most) of these are not school sanctioned- and anyone can access and post and read!!
From some of the pics 
- I am assuming that there is a lot of ‘fishing’ going on. Hopefully these students are aware of this also and are being careful with what they post.
Even the ZeeMee app has had a couple of fishing attempts happen- but those (at least for my D26s college) is monitored by actual staff- so those get shut down fairly quickly.
It is a shame that there are not more online communities that have a true measure of safety and inclusion that these students can come together and truly get to know each other before school starts!
My daughter is having the most luck with connections through Discord. For her school- there is one that is monitored by current students.
The best advice D26 got was to research some clubs and activities that they would most likely take part in and then see about joining and/or looking at their social media to see if those students align with you and what you are looking for in ‘your people’. That is the groups you will most likely be with once on campus.
This stereotype seems familiar in that it seems to be a reminder of the forum chatter about historically White sororities at some campuses.
I think it’s important for parents to try to advise/guide their kid(s) to recognize that the image people post of themselves online is not always what they’re like 100% of the time in person.
that being said, 1 of D24’s BFFs attends the college that D26 will be attending. D24’s BFF, during freshman year, took 1 of the standard introductory freshman classes…like a writing composition class or something along those lines. The professor had everybody go around the room to do a quick intro of themselves & as an ice breaker, you had to say what 1 of your hobbies are.
It was D24’s BFF’s turn to speak and she said that her favorite hobbies were reading and doing crochet. The girl sitting next to her scoffed at that and said, “OMG, like, are those even REAL hobbies?”
What was that girl’s hobby? Tanning. 
Needless to say, the 2 students did not become friends. But that’s ok because there were plenty of other fish in the sea.
A large proportion of the profiles I mentioned above included “planning to rush” in their bios, so I do think there’s a link. Around a quarter, I believe, of C26’s campus is involved in Greek life, but I think the “planning to rush” crowd (mostly but not exclusively women) make up around 80%if not more of the profiles. Would definitely give a skewed picture if someone didn’t have the broader context.
Both of my kids joined those pages and I think did a little messaging with people that they “met” but they both went random for roommates which worked out for them and I don’t think either of them found anyone on social media that they actually became friends with. So I would advise ignoring if it’s not making them excited about school.