Pampered Students ‘Can’t Seem to Maintain Minimum Standards of Sanitation’

The Philadelphia Inquirer has added a chapter to the annals of pampered students. This story is about cleaning services for dorm rooms and fraternity houses at the University of Pennsylvania and other colleges. The cleaners can make around $20 an hour. Who pays? “Mom and Dad, of course.”

The reporter, Kathy Boccella, takes a tone of righteous outrage at the frat boys and rich kids in her account: “Scrubbing toilets isn’t in the game plan for these coddled customers, who intend to go through life never picking up a can of Comet….”

But, she writes, “a new array of services … has cropped up recently nationwide to cater to able-bodied kids who can’t seem to maintain minimum standards of sanitation. In addition to cleaning dorm rooms and off-campus residences, some wash and fold laundry, drop off cases of water, even arrange for groceries to be delivered.”

The services go by names like DormMom, CollegeBellhop, DormAid, and Soapy Joe’s.

Some of them have been started by entrepreneurial students. Mike Kopko, who started DormAid at Harvard University, says of parents: “They raise a son or daughter, do their laundry, clean for them, then ship them off to college, where they have four years to identify a career path and make grades and get into graduate school…. They don’t want them spending three or four hours a week doing laundry.”

Ms. Boccella adds: “Though, in truth, they may never have seen Mom or Dad perform such tedious tasks, either.”