A new source of social anxiety for high school seniors: The rise of incoming class Instagram pages

By Mary Frances Ruskell, CNN

(CNN) — After years of preparation, college applications and some acceptances, I thought the stress of my senior year of high school was over last spring.

But I was wrong, thanks to the rise of social media accounts centered on finding friends and roommates online, months before the first day of college.

I’d seen kids in the grades ahead of me share posts of themselves on Instagram accounts to connect to future college classmates. Now I was worried that I was supposed to make my college friends before I even stepped foot on campus.

How could I decide who my friends would be from highly curated picture selections and nearly identical bios? In their bios, all the girls loved a good night out and were down for a good night in, and the boys all loved the gym. Everyone was excited for new friends. It seemed like nobody wanted to really be honest and risk sounding weird.

Eventually, I learned these pages are rarely run by the schools themselves. Instead, outside companies and contractors often manage them, many without permission from the schools they cater to. Incoming college freshmen are easy targets for people looking to profit from anxiety about loneliness, which the former US Surgeon General called an epidemic. Only about one-quarter of current college students say that they “feel deeply connected to at least one community,” according to the 2025 Harvard Youth Poll.

These Instagram pages offer a way to reach out before ever arriving on campus, potentially assuaging anticipatory worry and first-day awkwardness.

Incoming freshmen: Make friends online now!

For those of you who went to college before social media, it works like this: As soon as acceptance decisions come out, incoming freshmen can post pictures and bios of themselves on class Instagram pages in hopes of connecting with other incoming freshmen at a particular university. These social media handles read something like “@NameOfCollegeclassof30” or “RandomUniversity_2030.” (The number is the incoming class’s graduating year.)

Incoming freshmen submit a few pictures and a little about themselves, such as hometown, prospective major, hobbies and interests. Often, they must submit proof of admission, such as a picture of their acceptance letter. Sometimes they have to pay a fee to have their information posted.

I followed the Instagram student pages of all the schools where I was accepted and saw hundreds of posts featuring incoming freshmen who might be my future friends or roommates. Every post’s description ended with encouragement to connect: “I’m looking for a roommate and friends, so please reach out!”

When my parents went to college, people didn’t choose their first-year roommates — but many schools allow it now. Incoming freshmen can still opt to have a randomly assigned roommate, but from what I’ve seen among my friends and classmates, most people don’t. If students don’t already have friends at the same school, they are left scrambling to find someone. Some schools have roommate-matching questionnaires, but Instagram seems to be a popular method.

Eventually I decided on Dartmouth College, which requires everyone to have a random freshman year roommate. The purpose of my college’s incoming students page seemed to be strictly to make friends. I checked the page daily but never posted or texted anyone. I couldn’t figure out what to say.

Making friends IRL

On the drive to campus, my mom told me that everyone was going to be in the same boat, scared and looking for friends, no matter how together they seemed. She told me to just keep reaching out in person and to be as friendly and open as possible.

I showed up on move-in day without any premade friends and only knowing two people from my high school. I got assigned a single room. I was terrified.

As a result, I made sure to attend events during my college’s orientation week. Jane and I met when we were partnered up to learn contra dances during one such activity. I met my good friend Christina on our first-year trip, when students go backpacking in the woods to bond. Without the early advantage of a roommate, I went with the girls across the hall to events.

I auditioned for and applied to multiple clubs and attended a lot of meetings. I didn’t stick with all of them, but the clubs I joined — choir, one of the student newspapers and the outing club — have given me wonderful friends. I also met people through classes or friends of friends, and by simply seeing them around a lot.

Luckily, I also had buddies from home who advised me before I left for college. Vincent, a senior at Elon University, said that the best piece of advice he could give to high school seniors is to learn “transient social skills.”

“I try to say hi to everybody,” he explained. “It’s so simple that people think about it too much, but the hardest part is literally just seeing someone you half-know and being like ‘Oh, hey, what’s up, man?’”

My friend Hannah, a junior at the University of South Carolina, told me to “be a woman of the people. You just keep getting introduced to your friends’ friends. That’s the biggest way I met people is just getting introduced by other people you meet.”

Vincent understood my anxiety about the long wait before arriving on campus. “There’s such a feeling of anticipation you have, and you’re anxiously imagining each little life you could live,” he noted. “This is a really interesting period that a lot of companies market toward.”

But he said those apps are marketing an illusion of college life. “When you’re about to enter college, you’re just trying to hype yourself up. I think the best thing to do, if you want a real college experience, is to just go and meet a random person.”

So, if you don’t actually need to make friends before showing up on campus, why are there so many of these Instagram pages? Who is setting them up? As it turns out, it’s not always the college or university or students attending the school.

Who is running these pages?

If you look for class of 2030 Instagram pages for most universities and colleges, you likely will find multiple competing accounts. Some are run by the college admissions office or a student admissions club, but the ones I looked into are run by outside companies and contractors.

Some of the accounts are backed by companies or apps that claim to help kids connect by giving them access to group chats, forums and the chance to reach out and meet people before the school year begins.

Some accounts ask kids to send them money to have their bio posted on their account. UniPostings offers a graduated pricing scheme, with $25 getting an incoming student’s bio posted instantly. After freshmen get on campus or sometimes even earlier, some of these accounts shift into promotional devices. They post flyers to parties and events that are nearly all ticketed, meaning that they cost money for admission. They also post ads for apartments, rentals and merch.

Who is behind the companies?

Owen Giordano, the founder of UniPostings and a senior at Pennsylvania State University, told me that he started his pages after seeing his little sister use Instagram to try to decide on a school and find a roommate. He said he doesn’t work with the schools when creating or operating pages pitching their students.

Giordano thought kids were willing to pay to feel more secure in a very vulnerable time. “The payment barrier, it seems that it … almost gives you confirmation that these are people that are interested in the school,” he said. “A lot of people like to start getting posted before they’re fully accepted. It’s just a school that they’re really interested in.”

The fee UniPostings charges also “protects against fake posts or people taking advantage of being posted on 20 different accounts to gain followers,” he added, noting that incoming freshmen don’t want to make friends who end up going to another school.

Jonah Liss and Blake Mischley, the founders of MeetYourClass, graduated from the University of Michigan in 2025 after meeting on an incoming class Instagram page. Liss said their company works with about 30 schools to run and manage first-year Instagram pages.

There are two reasons universities sign up for his company’s services, Liss told me. “The first one is that we’ve measured that the average student who gets featured makes 51 new friends before they come on campus. So, from the university’s perspective, it’s just more belonging in our community building,” he said. “The second piece is that we found that students who get featured on the Instagram page persist at higher rates.” That is, they enroll and arrive on campus in the fall.

‘The summer melt’

Schools have a problem called the “summer melt,” a phenomenon in which students say they intend to enroll at a school but do not show up in the fall. Liss and Mischley think that students who post have a better retention rate because they have more of a sense of community and are less afraid because they’re already familiar with a few people.

But do those connections turn into friends? Not necessarily, but Mischley said it’s a start toward building community.

“I went to U of M, and I followed probably several hundred students,” Mischley said. “Now, obviously was I friends with all of them? No. But I saw them in my feed so much to where when I would see them on campus, I just recognized their face.”

How to navigate pages

When I looked up “Dartmouth 2030” on Instagram, about a dozen accounts came up. Typically, you can figure out who’s running the page by looking at the page’s bio, links, highlights and pinned posts. A pinned post (placed at the top of the account and doesn’t move down when other posts are made) names Dartmouth Admissions and features a link to Dartmouth’s official onboarding site. The for-profit pages often have links to the company that runs it in the bio and pinned posts promoting their app or site.

Prospective students can also look on their school’s admission website. The Dartmouth Admissions site recommends the following: “The easiest way to begin connecting with other admitted students is to follow your Class Instagram account. Once created, the link to this group is posted on our Admitted Students page.” (I reached out to Dartmouth’s office of communications, as well as Instagram’s parent company Meta, to get their take on these pages but didn’t hear back by publication time.)

Don’t want to join those pages? Colleges and universities know that incoming students, especially those who went through middle school during the pandemic, need ways in real life to meet and make friends, so they have organized events like the ones I attended. Also, plenty of college activities and parties are free and don’t require purchasing tickets from an Instagram account.

“I had zero friends on campus before I showed up,” Jane told me. “I definitely lurked on the Instagram (page), but I didn’t post. I didn’t comment. People were saying, ‘This Instagram is so great! You’re gonna show up to campus with a group and that’s the way to do it.’ That’s not the way I did it, and it turned out just fine.”

Remember that many incoming freshmen really don’t know anybody, so it’s perfectly fine to just ask to tag along with people you don’t know. Try stuff out, get involved and don’t be afraid to ask the people you meet for their numbers to stay in contact. It’s important to be able to reach out and ask to grab coffee or a meal. Chances are, they’ll say yes.

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