The college dorm shopping industrial complex is real | Hacker News Reader

The college dorm shopping industrial complex is real

vox.com

23 pointspseudolus44 comments

I guess "some people, including parents, go nuts on decorating" is a less catchy headline than calling it an "industrial complex" despite it lacking any real similarly to the military industrial one, and more just being run of the mill consumerism...

EDIT: I think this is an important distinction because as far as I can tell from the article, there's no university-admin+corporate marketer behind the scenes wheeling and dealing going on, and no revolving door between the two. Helicopter parenting + consumer brand marketing is a VERY different phenomena, yet from the headline, you'd think the college dorms themselves are somehow driving it.

Isn't it the thing you'd expect from American parents, with their crazy helicoptering-I-will-control-everything-and-spend-any-amount-of-money-on-my-children?

To a first approximation, all college related phenomena involving money are derivative of the student loan industry. Fitting in is at least as likely to involve loan money and credit cards. Every one doesn’t have mom money.

I attended a large state school in the early 2010’s and I witnessed a lot of the things described in the article. Many affluent out-of-state students had dorm rooms lushly decorated with disposable tchotchkes. Most of this is completely between the students and parent, however, there definitely was some sort of commercialization involving university administrators.

At the beginning of every school year, the university distributed marketing material literature for services such as:

- On campus “pop-up shops” for dorm decorations

- Overpriced minifridge rentals

- Overpriced and low quality linens/sheets/towels

- Organized shopping trips to department stores (students were bussed from campus to the store and the store was closed to the public)

The advertisements were often construed as official university services, but were actually just lead generators for 3rd party businesses.

Obviously, the university was getting some sort of kickback for all of this.

That all definitely fit the headline of the article but also seems to be much better reporting than the article itself presents. :|

In the early 2000s the only ones of those we got at my state school were: kiosks for posters in common space on campus + minifridge rentals + rug sale kiosks. Definitely a LOT more spartan.

I'd be hard pressed to think of an article I've skimmed that I relate less to than this one. In my first dorm room, the priority was a mini fridge, for obvious reasons. It may have been the only dorm-specific item I bought. The box it came in became our coffee table for the entire year.

Minifridge + footlocker for me. The footlocker became the pantry and coffee table for us, and a way to get my things home at the end of the year.

The author says she had a similar experience as a student—it was when shopping for her son more recently that she encountered all this!

> A $150 bar cart that can be a “side table or a study area.” (The top of my ugly rental fridge was my bar cart.)

yeah I'm kinda confused also, and I only graduated a few years ago. other than the (very important) minifridge, I doubt I spent more than $50 on "dorm outfitting".

nor did I see "dorm outfitting" as some conspicuous class signal. the rich kids had nicer clothes and maybe newer laptops, but otherwise their dorms looked just as shitty as the rest. the "cool" dorms were decorated imaginatively, not expensively.

For some reason fancy rugs and bedding were very popular with the wealthier kids at my school. About 15 years ago. Faux fur and shag were all the rage. It seemed so fancy at the time, but in reality you can buy these items at Target for around $100, even back then.

The desire to spend some money to show off a fancier "self-made" home existed, but it wasn't lead by a marketing system or influencers.

I have no idea how they all came upon shag before social media was a thing, though.

Half the fun with friends in college is because everybody is broke.

With student loans that isn't as true as it used to be. Today your required expenses are all covered, so every penny you earn from the part time job can be spent. They might only earn minimum wage, but all the required expenses are not paid for by the job (parents provide health insurance and a car; tuition, room, and board all come from loans), thus everything earned can be spent on whatever.

This will all come to haunt those students who take advantage of it in 4-8 years when they are out of school and need to pay off those loans.

Yup. The extra furniture we got was either from craigslist (ie: international student leaving country, has 24 hours to get rid of everything) or used items from the school itself (ie: classy dumpster diving). I went to a very elite school but almost no one wanted to show off how much money mommy and daddy had.

"Industrial Complex" isn't really accurate. That phrase generally denotes an industry that has become intermixed with government & regulatory bodies complete with their own lobbying groups to solidify regulatory capture.

A large segment of the home decor market being targeted at dorm living doesn't really qualify. Here's a list of commonly considered industrial complexes [0], and dorm living doesn't really fit among them. All of them significantly intersect with laws and regulations. I'm not sure that Celebrity and Hot Take should be on that list, but they at least are very influential on public opinion on a range of topics.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_complex

Most of the article is just links to products and most of those links are affiliate links. You can make your own conclusions

Vox has an editorial firewall. You can believe in its veracity or not—but the tone of the article struck me as pretty critical of the whole industry, which isn’t exactly how you sell products!

That's the brilliant thing about it. It is critical of the industry, while profiting off the industry, and advertising for the industry.

Like that promotional scene in Wayne's World (1992) where they show off the blatant commercialism as criticism (but the product placements were probably just as effective).

Reverse psychology. No single strategy is enough for every target audience

It's to capture the self-loathing etail-therapy market. Folks who will be depressed enough by the article, that they convince themselves that 'just this one' will fill some void in their life. It's one thing to criticize capitalism, but leaving money on the table is plain foolish

> which isn’t exactly how you sell products!

Well I think this is exactly how it works nowadays. TV ads making fun of TV ads, Corporate produced TV shows making fun on corporate culture. This self awareness part is to show empathy but nonetheless continue with behavior that they are condemning.

I graduated less than half a decade ago, and I find this difficult to square with my experience: I think I spent a sum total of $500 on furniture over 4 years of undergraduate, including a bedframe and mattress when I moved into non-dorm housing. Most of my/our furniture came from the steady stream of other students moving out nearby and not wanting to haul a couch/table/other item down the stairs. I wouldn't be surprised if most of the furniture we used is still in the same building, maybe a few units down the hall.

Dumpster diving at the end of the school year was always fantastic. Some of the favorite finds from me and my roommates were:

- Desk chair

- Giant dresser (looked brand new like it had been bought at the beginning of the year and thrown out at the end)

- Still functioning 40" plasma TV

- A suit that had never been worn, still had the pockets stitched closed

I graduated a similar time ago. If you used campus housing, they provided the basics (desk, chair, bed/mattress, wardrobe, and a minifridge), but you could buy extra stuff if you had extra space. I had the same roommate all 4 years, and we collectively spent probably $400 on extra stuff over that time, the most expensive of which was a second-hand couch that cost around $250 that we acquired our third year.

The average they give in the article is about $1500 and that includes electronics/appliances. A PC, TV and a mini-fridge gets you there pretty quick.

Yeah, that's perhaps where the gap is: I brought a (used, $300) laptop with me to college and I didn't buy either a TV or a mini-fridge.

This connects to something I had been thinking about. I had visited my alma mater (State University of New York at Stony Brook) last year and the overall impression is: it is so much nicer than when I graduated in '03 which I heard was much nicer than it was ever before.

My idea is this - a hundred years ago, college was a rare thing that a small subset of population (intellectuals, driven to expand their minds) strove to achieved. They did not "mind" the poverty of the experiences because to them the education was the goal.

Over time, as college education became "something everyone gets" - the percentage of true scholars became a minuscule part of the student body. However, the student body itself became much larger.

As any business, the way a college serves a scholar vs how it serves an average person is different. Because an average person cares not for expanding their mind, but they might very well pick a campus that looked brighter, dorms that looked nicer, etc, colleges obviously invested in those things.

I had never seen anything like the dorm in this article, but the idea doesn't shock me as a representation of the movement of a college student from scholar to a consumer.

Elder millennial here - I attended university in the bay area. Before leaving, my family sent me to the military surplus store and then handed me a bus ticket. We are not a military family, but starting the experience at such a utilitarian place set the proper tone.

Everything you move in, you have to move out 9 months later, even if it's just to the nearest dumpster. That includes the stuff you accumulate during those 9 months. Best to keep it minimal.

That always seems so weird about US (and other countries that do it similarly) dorms to me. Why not let people keep the same place and leave the stuff in it?

I think the schools try to keep simmiliar aged people together. Freshman make friends then they organize new dorm set ups together. There's just a lot of turnover

Sure, but that's one move after year/semester 1, not a "every X month" thing if it isn't forced to be.

I think every 9 months means two semesters worth with the almost 3months of summer off.

The entire point of going away to college is to learn to live on your own, which includes learning what you need and how to obtain it. Obviously there are some feed forward items your kid needs to land on their feet - like linens, toiletries, a laundry bag, and a mini fridge. But stuffing your kid's dorm room full of all this crap (just look at that lead in picture!) before they're even living there is pure self-centered suffocation on the part of the parents.

The article touches on this slightly ("there’s a bit of helicopter parenting, something I have enough self-awareness to realize"), but seemingly only to create an illusion of self awareness rather than truly examining it as the main factor underlying this whole thing. Seriously, your kids will be fine without your overbearing involvement, despite what the crap making industry wants you to believe.

Colleges are supposed to educate the most promising brightest kids.

Their peers who don't go to college are expected to be able to procure themselves right away.

And yet those brightest kids still need to learn valuable lessons freshman year, such as what happens if you don't brush your teeth for a week because your parents aren't nagging you. Or what grows when you leave food in the fridge for a month.

> Their peers who don't go to college are expected to be able to procure themselves right away.

I don't know why you're lobbing some sort of privilege nasty. Kids that don't go to college are a different topic, and quite heterogeneous at that. My same sentiment applies to someone who moves from childhood home into their own apartment without college. On the other hand, there are plenty of kids who don't go to college and don't move out (due to the crushing housing bubble), and thereby have a hard time becoming independent. And obviously kids who get pushed out of their childhood home or didn't have a solid one to begin with aren't suffering the affluenza described in the article.

> Or what grows when you leave food in the fridge for a month.

With the rise of meal plans though, you see a lot of Americans going out of college at age 22 being... completely useless?

Good lord, I know HN skews older and male but this is a whole new level of out of touch. Which honestly I'm not surprised about, but the level of dismissiveness surrounding it is odd.

This is the result of a new breed of lifestyle internet personalities -- most of them have found their home on YouTube since it's usually longer-form content but they're also on Twitter/IG/TikTok/Pinterest which is where most people discover them. The rough description if you want something maybe more relatable is that they're streamers for girls and young women. Yes streamers are streamers for girls and young women but the point is that it’s the same sort of thing. But rather than playing Hades or Minecraft, they're cooking, cleaning, making art, doing makeup, practicing yoga, talking about life, studying, bullet journaling, and decorating their living spaces.

It's actually really cool stuff. At least I really enjoy the content. It's good for people that respond well to body-doubling for motivation. And since maximalism is back for home decor (thank god finally, 4 basically empty walls feels like a hospital) you see lots of people surrounding themselves with stuff that brings them joy and happiness to be around -- plants, blankets, walls full of art, fairy lights, stuffed animals / figurines. And college is the perfect storm of wanting to express yourself, reinvent yourself, and usually starting with a blank slate.

At first, I thought this article was going to be about the industrial complex that's cropped up around college dorm construction and marketing. It's as if schools are in an arms race when it comes to building and selling students on the fanciest dorms.

I recently accompanied a teenager (not my kid) on a campus tour for a big, well-known state school. I think that the parents asked maybe six questions. Two were about whether their kids would be forced to get vaccinated and the remaining four were about the dorms.

Asking about accommodation is absolutely valid, but couldn't someone have also spoken up about, I don't know, academics? The tour guide spent probably 30 minutes talking about dorms and maybe 5 minutes talking about classes and research.

And then we wonder why US college education costs tens of thousands of dollars per year. Sad.

Most undergraduates are not there for the academics per se. They are there to be employable when they finish. They care about the reputation of the school, social opportunites such as fraternities and clubs and what doors those will open later, and yes how nice the dorms are.

While I generally agree (as someone who in the past few years graduated from such a university), the reality is that the tours are about the residential aspect of campus and not the academic part of campus. The entire point of them is to address what life is like.

If you are touring the university you have almost guaranteed already researched the academic aspect of the university. And more importantly, part of the issue is that most universities (particularly Tier 1 universities) will provide on average a very mediocre "standard" undergraduate education. Of course if you go out of your way you can get a really good education but the default experience is going to be meh at best.

This leaves the question of "why would I want to study somewhere I know will likely give me a meh experience when it's also miserable living there" which is how you end up with the way universities are updating their residential environments.

most tours are given by undergrads. what kinds of questions about academics do you expect them to answer? outside of their own major, they probably don't have any information you couldn't look up on the website.

this ties into (imo) one of the bigger problems with college education. even if you introduce them to someone who is knowledgeable about the academics, your average 18 yo and their parent aren't really in a position to evaluate the responses. reputation and campus life are the only aspects of college that are easily understood.

This article is a nice reminder that I don't use Instagram and never will.

Heh, so much different than my dorm room... So cute and sterile - like the ideas and emotions that would be experienced there I guess.

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