New ticket plan still stuck at the gate

When 60,000 students want a piece of Beaver Stadium and there are only 21,000 slices to go around, a lot of people are going to be disappointed. For every person who’s happy with a change in the ticket allocation system, another person will cry “unfair.”

In this year’s system, each class will have its own ticket sale. These separate sales should alleviate the overloaded demand problems that plagued last year’s allocation process.

But while this plan makes smart changes to the way tickets are allocated, it fails to address the major problem — which students should get tickets?

This year, the number of tickets available to each class will be based on the enrollment numbers for that class at University Park. Mathematically, this means that classes with a large number of students at commonwealth campuses — namely, the freshman class — will have less of a chance of getting tickets than incoming seniors do.

While this plan is a step in the right direction, it’s not strong enough to really address the problem: It’s still perfectly possible to go four years without getting a ticket.

Every student deserves at least one year of football tickets. If it’s not technically feasible to guarantee that, then let’s at least make sure as few seniors as possible have to spend their Saturdays with the Big Ten Network instead of the Blue Band.

In the same vein, freshmen and sophomores who attend University Park deserve a higher likelihood of getting tickets than their counterparts at commonwealth campuses. We know, we know: We’re all Penn State. But when University Park students are paying thousands of dollars more in tuition, they deserve a better chance at getting tickets.

Besides, freshmen and sophomores at commonwealth campuses will soon become upperclassmen, at which point the ticket allocation tables will have turned in their favor.

One of the reasons students get angry when they don’t get tickets is that they think the person they lost out to is selling them on eBay for quadruple the price. Penn State officials say they plan to address the scalping issue next year by implementing an ID-card system. However, it’s disappointing that it wasn’t ready for this season.

But honestly, the biggest disappointment with this year’s ticket plan is that we can only critique it after the fact.

If Penn State officials were really concerned about getting comprehensive student input on the process, they should have released the plan for public review before it was made permanent. All students deserve to have input on the plan, not just the select few lucky enough to meet with administrators or run into them in HUB-Robeson Center.

Even if you can’t please everyone, you can at least make sure their voices are heard.