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Bellingham, WA
May 3, 2006
WWU, Bellingham -- This is the time of
year when tens of thousands of college
students have only one thing on their
minds: graduation. The end is finally in
sight and all of their hard work is about
to pay off. For many, the workload is at
an all time high, and for others it’s the
partying that’s at its peak. Either way,
most soon-to-be graduates are beginning
to think about who to invite to their
graduation ceremony in a few months.
Phone calls are being made.
Grandparents are excited, and siblings
are jealous. This is also about the time
that students learn about something
called graduation tickets. What are
graduation tickets?
Graduation tickets are a method that
most universities use for controlling the
number of guests each graduate can
invite to their commencement. With
college attendance at an all time high,
they are sometimes a necessary
inconvenience. Unfortunately, that
number is annoyingly low at most
universities. Western Washington
University only allows each student four
graduation tickets, and others in
Washington State allow as few as two!
Students can invite two relatives out of
the potentially dozens eager to attend?
Does she invite her parents? Well what
about Grandma that helped pay for
everything since they she first started
attending? What about that young sister
that doesn’t think college is worth it?
The difficulties with this type of system
are obvious. What’s not obvious is a
solution.
One bit of good news for our seniors is
that not every student decides to “walk”
at graduation, or their families simply
live too far away to come.
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That means that they don’t intend to use
all of their tickets, which in turn means
that there is a supply of extra tickets out
there. One tricky part is that the student
with those extra tickets doesn’t often
realize there is a demand for them, when
in fact many students are more than willing
to offer them a fair price in exchange
for those extra tickets. Countless graduation
tickets are simply never used each year.
Another problem, until recently at least,
was finding a good way to bring those
with extra tickets together with students
or relatives that want them. That
problem was largely solved by
Bellingham resident and recent graduate,
Scott Pratschner who created a website
called www.graduationtickets.com.
Now students can create a free account
on graduationtickets.com, and post their
extra tickets where hundreds of other
students from their university can easily
and anonymously search for them. The
site is a reasonably secure environment,
as anyone posting a ticket for sale (or for
free), must have a valid college email
address before their tickets can be
viewed. These email addresses are
uniquely identifiable, and greatly lessen
any risk of fraud. The transaction is also
facilitated by allowing the tickets to be
purchased through Paypal™, a free
online money exchange service. The
market-like structure of the site also
helps get rid of “gouging” prices as the
competition is all sharing the same page.
“The trick”, says Scott “is getting the
word out. You can download and post a
flyer from the web page, or just spread
the word. We’ll need the students’ help
to get this web page known. My hope is
that will help fix a broken system,
though I’ll admit it’s still an experiment.
We’re certainly off to a running start
though!”
Best of luck to the graduating seniors
out there! You’ve earned the right to have
your family and friends there cheering
for you when you accept your degree.
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