Being the senior that I am, last Thursday I went to the student center to pick up all of the graduation necessities: cap, gown, and my FOUR graduation tickets. Four tickets… not even six. Maybe the thought is, “Student’s are in college four years, so they should pick the most important person from each year and that’s who deserves a ticket.” Maybe that idea is a little irrational, maybe not.
We spend four years as undergraduates working as hard as possible while gaining immense support from many people in our lives helping us get through college and achieve our goals. Whether it’s family, friends, whomever, why should we have to pick and choose who is worthy of four graduation tickets? It’s a major accomplishment in our lives, not everyone graduates from college. For some students they might be the first person in their family to go to college, let alone graduate. If you have a family of more than four members that have never gone to college, and their son, daughter, nephew, niece, grandson or granddaughter is the first in the family to graduate, don’t you think this would be an extremely important event in their lives that they have the right to witness? Even if this isn’t the case, why can’t a student have as many people watch them graduate that they want? Okay, now there’s going to be that one person that might be thinking, “well if you open that door for a student then they’ll invite 100 people.” I’m not saying that it should be a ticket free for all where students should get as many tickets as they want for free. I do believe that there should be some restrictions. In my opinion, I think that students should get anywhere between six and eight free tickets. Once a student reaches that limit there should be prices for tickets if students need to buy more. The more tickets you need to buy, the more the price increases. I do agree that even with this idea there should be some sort of limit to how many tickets a student gets, but it certainly should not be four. I decided to do some research just to cure my curiosity of how my tickets graduating seniors get at other colleges. Westminster students get six tickets, which isn’t many, but still better than four. Penn State Main, and Behrend are unlimited, yes Penn State Main students get an unlimited number of tickets. Youngstown State also has an unlimited amount. And I was informed that YSU students don’t even have tickets, whoever wants to go gets to go. Hmm, how interesting, now these are only four schools, but if you think about the size of Penn State’s student body, compared to Slippery Rock, it is pretty ridiculous we only get four measly tickets.
Luckily for me, this four graduation ticket debacle is not a huge problem. Would I like to have a few more tickets so a few more family member could seem me graduate? Yes, of course, but I have a relatively small family, so it doesn’t impact me as much as those who have larger families. Now it may seem contradictory that I am complaining about this ticket situation and am not personally affected by the low amount of tickets we get to have. But the whole reason this is so bothersome to me is because I see how upset it makes other students. Students who can’t get their hands on other tickets will indeed have to pick and choose who they want at their graduation. One of the “suggested” problems with having a larger number of attendees is being able to fit them all in one place. Okay, how about the football stadium? The response: it could rain. How about the school invests in a tarp or cover that will cover the students? The University just spent 39 million dollars building the new student center, I think they can afford a covering to protect their accomplished graduates.
