YouTube: The New Form of College Entrepreneurship

College move-in day means a lot of things — crying parents, hauling boxes, cramming clothes into drawers — and for Syracuse University sophomore Margot Lee, it also means a vlog camera and two hundred thousand views on YouTube.

Lee is just one of the many college-aged beauty vloggers who have found a platform on YouTube. Vloggers upload skincare routines, makeup tutorials, clothing hauls and more, all in the comfort of their own dorm rooms. In addition to beauty videos, they also showcase their college lifestyles to their many viewers. A simple search of ‘college day in my life’ yields thousands of results, many with several thousand views or more.

Although the YouTube beauty guru phenomenon started years ago, at its onset it was mostly made up of women with backgrounds in makeup artistry. However, as cameras became cheaper and young girls began gaining followers through social media sites like Twitter and Instagram, regular high school and college students could join YouTube and become popular with relative ease.

Now, YouTube is not only a way for girls to get their foot in the door of the fashion, beauty, and entertainment industries, but it’s also a way for college students to make significant amounts of money. For example, Lee posts sponsored videos, working with companies like Glossier, Gillette, FabFitFun, and many more. In producing sponsored videos, Lee makes a profit not only from her views, but also from the companies she works with.

However, putting themselves out there on the internet also has its downfalls. In a recent video, YouTuber and University of Southern California sophomore Tasha Farsaci details her experiences dealing with her peers insulting her online and the ways in which it negatively impacted her sorority recruitment process.

For other YouTubers, making videos has been a way to bypass the college system altogether. Beauty and fitness guru Tori Sterling explained in a video that she was dropping out of the University of Alabama in order to live on her own, take classes on her own schedule, and dedicate more of her time to producing content.

Although the word ‘YouTuber’ may connote the image of Jake Paul terrorizing his neighbors in a mansion in Los Angeles, the truth is that for many college girls Youtube has been a path to becoming involved in the fields they wish to join one day, as well as a way to make some serious money while they’re still in school.