Parents pay for laundry, maids and meal kits for college kids
Updated: Aug 17
Affluent parents are paying for laundry and maid service for their college darlings, reports Grey Battle in the Washington Post. Some students get meal kits and moving services too. In theory, it saves time that will be spent pursuing knowledge.
Personal-service providers pitch productivity, writes Battle. “There are better things you could do with your time in college,” says Dorm Mom, which offers laundry, dorm cleaning, grocery delivery and moving services. Tovala, which delivers meal kits for students, warns, “Planning what to make for breakfast, lunch, and dinner seven days a week quickly becomes exhausting as a student with a full schedule.”
E&R Laundry has more than 10,000 customers at 106 schools. They pay $800 and $1,800 each academic year for laundry services. “When you dress well, when your clothes are clean, you act better,” says the owner, Rick Botnick.
“A clean and clutter-free environment gives them the best opportunity to excel and focus,” says John Grant, who owns Maids of Capitol Hill. He charges $160 to clean a student's apartment. Laundry is extra.
Demand is rising for moving services too. Holly Benjamin, who works for the moving service Lugg, says the rise of dorm decorators has helped business. Students have "more stuff to move in and out."
Elijah Hurewitz-Ravitch, raised by helicopter parents, started Yale with laundry service, he told Battle. He had a revelation when he lived on his own one summer: “Laundry is easy.”
If students don't learn to research, reason and write at college, at least they should learn basic adulting skills, such as how to feed yourself, clean up after yourself and operate a washer and dryer. It's really not that hard.
Anxious parents trade advice in online groups on what to do if their college kid gets a bad grade or the soap in the dorm bathroom is low quality, writes Arthur Brooks on the Free Press. They stress over dorm wall paint colors and set up playdates for their shy children. “Know you can DoorDash the essentials, if you’re feeling desperate!” one mother wrote.
His answer: Do nothing. Let your child figure it out.
Elite colleges are breeding socialists, argues Kimberlee Josephson, a business professor at Lebanon Valley College, in the Wall Street Journal. All-you-can-eat meal plans, campus shuttles, fitness centers, counseling and health care seem to be free, because the "costs are embedded in tuition and fees, endowment income, donor support and government funding."
"Is it any wonder that many graduates experience sticker shock on entering adult life?," writes Josephson. "Grocery bills, utility payments, security deposits, transportation, internet service, gym memberships and countless other expenses suddenly become explicit rather than bundled."
I think that a good number of students never had to do any of these tasks at home and were never taught how to do them in the first place. "Domestic skills" are a lost art, starting with basics like cooking and cleaning and all the way through to "smaller" things like removing stains from clothing, sewing a needle on a shirt, or folding laundry. And my guess is that much of this can be said for the parents who raised them, also knowing these traditional life skills.
Many of these kids failed in middle and high school in terms of learning about
life and adulting and now are failing in college...
There have been cases where parents have shown up for interviews that their kids
are having (I never had a parent attend a job interview for me), but I guess kids
aren't learning what it is like to succeed or do things in the real world...
Most of these things we learned about in a semester of home economics (which every
student, male or female) was required to take in 8th grade along with industrial arts...
This is just pathetic indeed...
Way back in 2015, the British youtuber Lindy Beige did a video on why college students should be poor. The benefits of learning to manage expenses while in the protective environment where a bed and food are paid for.
I just watched a video of another youtuber, Casey Ladelle, who does heavy truck and snow rescue content. He was just saying goodbye to his summer helper, headed back to college for his senior year in something healthcare related. David, mentioned he washes dishes for spending money during the school year.
It occurred to me that David would be better prepared to deal with patients if he became a physician or even as a PhD researcher because he'd spent his summers…
Talk about spoiled rotten! By the time I entered 7th grade, I could clean, do laundry (including ironing and simple repairs - buttons etc) and cook - and so could my kids. All of that was before the internet was available; instructions with videos, recipes with videos - are now all available on demand. I now have 3 grandkids in college - without decorated dorm rooms and any of the above services - and they all had summer jobs.