Katie Lim worried selecting a bad roommate could tank her freshman year before it even began. A portal from the University of Maryland read like a government form: dense with text, full of questions to find possible pairings that were both vague yet oddly specific and utterly devoid of vibes. There wasn’t a single photo.
So the 18-year-old did what any self-respecting Gen Zer would do: She turned to Instagram. There she found not one, but three different pages run by private companies to help members of the Class of 2029 find roommates. Lim picked the one with the most engagement, uploaded ten carefully curated photos (volleyball, Chipotle, friends) and waited.
Two weeks later, her profile was live. The payoff was almost immediate: 150 new followers to her Instagram account and 30 DMs. The roommate search was officially on.
For the next week and a half, Lim basically ran a small HR department – privately messaging candidates for hours a day, and even enlisting ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini to help craft the perfect interview questions. One two-hour FaceTime later, and she had her winner. After Lim and her new roommate notified U-Md. over the summer that they wanted to live together, the two moved into their College Park dorm last week.
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As students across the country return to campus for the fall semester, Lim is part of a growing number of incoming first-years outsourcing their roommate search to social media pages helmed by private companies, the latest evolution in the stressful hunt increasingly happening online.
A few years ago, that search played out in Facebook groups that were run by students, parents or even administrators, where anyone could post a photo and a bio of themselves whenever they wanted.
But as Gen Z moved to Instagram, the search got trickier. There aren’t groups on Instagram, only pages. Pages that students or parents first tried to run themselves, often drowning in hundreds of messages from teenagers who wanted their information to be posted yesterday.
Now, private companies are increasingly sliding in to fill the void. While some students say the pages have helped them find what they hope would be a perfect match, others lament seeing their photos and bio reposted by a page they never contacted or gave approval for.
“They’re trying to get a sense of what it might be like to make friends there, to build community,” said Jennifer Grygiel, a communications professor at Syracuse University. “It speaks to the need to control what they can about an anxiety-inducing process – and to the commodification of everything online.”
Instagram recently announced new features it said would help college students better connect on the platform, including adding verified university badges to student profiles and offering access to a directory of their classmates.
Meet Your Class, a start-up founded by three recent graduates of the University of Michigan, had 217,755 student sign ups in the past year for its platform to help students find roommates or potential friends. It also has some 600,000 followers on its Instagram pages, reaching nearly 60 million individual Instagram accounts, according to company data shared with The Washington Post.
Blake Mischley, 22, co-founded the start-up after running a roommate page at Michigan and another at the University of South Florida. For each school, he tried to post at least 20 people seeking roommates a day, and each post took five minutes to craft. Meet Your Class now automates that process, though it requires humans to verify that each user has been accepted to the school. Its founders believe that boosting friendships among students before they even arrive on campus could eventually lead to higher graduation rates.
In January 2024, the company landed its first partnership with the Christ College of Nursing and Health Sciences in Cincinnati, which could then broadcast the platform on the university’s official channels for a fee.
This year, Meet Your Class is partnering with 23 schools – a list that includes mostly smaller, lesser resourced universities like St. Anselm College in New Hampshire or Ohio Northern University. The founders attribute the growth, in part, to schools only allowing students to join the official roommate portal once they’ve enrolled, a prospect that feels too late for many students.
“There’s a stereotype that younger people are antisocial in all these ways,” said Jonah Liss, 22, another Meet Your Class co-founder. “But they are really eager to socialize and know the type of people they might be going to school with.”
Liss says high school seniors have already started following Class of 2030 Instagram pages, even though they can’t officially sign up for the service without proof of acceptance into a college.
The University of Maryland, where Lim attends, is not among the current Meet Your Class partners. In an interview, director of resident life Dennis Passarella-George said that about one-third of incoming freshman make roommate requests from a variety of sources, including the school’s platform, meeting during admitted students day and, increasingly, Instagram.
That means the vast majority of students still ask the university to decide their roommates based on nine questions about their cleanliness, schedule, sociability and study habits, a proportion that has not changed significantly in recent years.
“Instagram might be good for a first blush,” said Passarella-George, who just celebrated his 31st fall move-in day at U-Md. “But you’ve got to dig a little deeper to figure out if the vibe is real and if we’re gonna be a good match.”
He added that, for his department, even more important than the roommate match is making sure they have a community on campus once they arrive.
Still, not everyone that uses the Instagram pages finds their match on them.
Keenan Williams, who just started at the University of Virginia, was also inundated with followers after his profile posted. He started messaging a few people, and tried to sus out candidates’ vibes based on their DMing cadence. If they used grandiose language to try to sound smart, he moved on.
After a while, the 18-year-old realized he didn’t particularly mesh with anyone. So he went back to U-Va.’s platform to pick someone from there, and eventually found a student from Brazil who similarly liked John Mayer, Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin.
Still, his Instagram search wasn’t completely wasted. On Monday night, Williams had a few friends over to his suite whom he’d met through his post.
“It kind of forms a community of people who kinda, sorta, know each other,” he said. “It made this giant school feel just a bit smaller.”
Jonathan Peter Belling, 18, another University of Maryland freshman, said his friends began following and posting on various Instagram pages as early as March, months before the official roommate selection. He’d heard the process was frustrating, with some friends messaging upward of 25 people only to get ghosted or find out a week later their perfect candidate had already agreed to room with someone else.
“I didn’t want to spend so much of my summer doing that,” he said. “A friend described it to me as ‘speed dating hell.’”
After briefly trying the U-Md. search portal, Belling decided to go with a roommate randomly assigned by the school. But he figured posting to one of the class Instagram pages couldn’t hurt. He was told he had a two week wait before his profile would appear there – unless he paid $7 to get posted immediately. He chose the free option, and still gained 150 followers, even though he was posted after the roommate selection deadline.
The co-founders of Meet Your Class say their ultimate goal is to partner with as many universities as possible, especially under-resourced schools. Their theory is that if more students connect with each other before arriving at school, retention and graduation rates could improve as students’ community ties strengthen.
Now that she’d gone through the roommate search, Lim could reflect on how the process shook out and what it means for her generation. First, she’d figured out what she wanted: someone ambitious, social, outgoing, fun-loving and academically inclined.
But she also noticed the way people did or did not abbreviate words in their texts, which she thought signaled enthusiasm, or lack thereof. “One girl didn’t type out the word, ‘yeah,’ she just spelled‚ ‘yea,’ so it seemed like she wasn’t interested,” Lim said.
She acknowledged the roommate search now playing out on privately run Instagram pages is “incredibly surface level,” and rewards certain types of personas over others. But after moving with her roommate into their dorm, which they color coordinated with shades of green, she feels she made the right decision.
“It feels unfair to judge people based on how they want to be perceived on Instagram,” she said, “But for a lot of us, that is part of who we are.”