About

College Decision Reveals are typically vlog updates that reveal a student's decision on which college they are attending. The reveal involves some sort of prop, like school-color cupcakes, balloons filled with school colors or school apparel like caps, t-shirts and sweatshirts to signify which school they chose.

Origin

On April 3rd, 2016, Taiylar Ball uploaded a video of her College decision announcement party (shown below). The video has gained 1,600 views in three years.

Precursor

Gender Reveals are celebrations where either the guests, the expecting parents, or both find out the sex of the baby usually through elaborate stunts that involve either the color pink (for girl) or blue (for boy). On October 25th, 2009, YouTuber shelleyblue293 uploaded a video of family and friends cutting into a cake to reveal the sex of the baby. The video has 72,000 views in ten years (shown below).

Spread

In late January 2017, many vloggers began sharing college decisions solely to viewers rather than to record a private reveal party. On January 31st, 2017, Jenna Simacek uploaded a video featuring her parents popping balloons filled with school-colored confetti (shown below, left). The video gained 9,800 views in two years. On March 2nd, Hannah Spurr uploaded a video to YouTube featuring cupcakes with school flags. The video gained over 900,000 views and 10,000 likes in two years. School flag cupcakes became a common prop. Commonly the cupcakes are just held and put aside rather than eaten on camera.

In April 2019, media outlets like Mashable,^[3] The Daily Dot^[1] and The Cut^[2] picked up on the trend. Parenting website Grown and Flown^[4] suggested that the new trend may be insensitive to those less privileged who can't pay for college.

College Rejection Video

In 2017, as the college decision reveal trend began to rise, some YouTubers began vlogging about how they only received college rejection letters. On May 3rd, 2017, Tiffanyferg uploaded a rejection rant to YouTube (shown below, left). The video gained over 626,600 views in two years. On May 9th, TianaRenay uploaded a rejection video that gained 582,000 views in two years (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References