I'm still in summer mode, riding my bike for hours every week, stuffing too many zucchini from my garden into a too small refrigerator, and trying to moderate my time online because ... well ... everything.
But it's back to school time, and for the parent who fears letting their kid figure out college life without family advantage, there are so many ways to spend money to ease their lives on campus from behind the scenes.
I've written before about interior designers specializing in dorm rooms, and it seems that the lucrative dorm decor market is expanding to support multiple tiktok and youtube dorm decor influencers who will (for a cut of sales) recommend supplies and accessories and decorating tips for parents prepared to spend thousands of dollars to to get their offspring fashionably settled in. Parents who wish for their child to really make a dorm decor impression can pay for design kits such as the "Emily" or the "Andrew" and order all the recommended design elements from a checklist.
Then should it be time to make the move from the dorm to the networking opportunities of a Greek house, parents can also pay thousands of dollars for a "Rush Consultant" who will coach young women on interviews, clothes, video applications and even the politics of particular houses. Driven by "escalating" competition for places in sororities, these consultants offer those who can afford it an edge into access to these social connections – from internships at the firms run by the parents of sorority sisters to matchmaking with they guys in the best fraternities.
The intersections of gender and class are pretty obvious here. British feminist sociologists such as Diane Reay, Beverly Skeggs, Carolyn Steedman and Valerie Walkerdine have been writing for decades about the roles that women play in sustaining and transmitting outward appearances of family respectability and status.
But no one who believes that the system is fundamentally fair would spend thousands of extra dollars before presenting their child for judgement by powerful gatekeepers. Every single dollar spent on gaming these competitions is a measure of how little these parents trust the system to sort out the innately best and the brightest (their children) for reward and recognition. Yet they conceal their purchase of opportunity to help sustain others' belief in that very fairness. Their children win only because they are indeed the very best.
And poor and working-class students are encouraged to trust that the system is fair and open to anyone who is willing to work hard and seek help from poorly-funded campus support resources.
Meanwhile, who could use some zucchini??
