For the 2006 Michigan football game at Beaver Stadium, a former roommate of mine agreed to sell his student ticket for the tidy sum of $80, a bag of beef jerky and a tuna melt. And that was a great deal, considering the highly anticipated match-up. Maybe the Penn State athletic ticket office should consider his form of currency.
Fast forward to last Saturday. A friend of mine and I had been planning a weekend full of football, fun and the Phyrst for more than a year -- he is a Syracuse native, so I told him I'd get him a ticket to come down for the game. I wanted him to truly experience Beaver Stadium, so I set out to get him a guest ticket for the student section.
Thinking the $50 or so would be worth it, I went to the Bryce Jordan Center for the seat. Forty-five minutes in line and $87 lighter in the pocket, I had what I had gone for.
The original ticket cost $57.50, but the university then tacked on nearly $30 in fees. Much of this added cost was for a "student ticket upgrade," which seemed as vague as it was aggravating.
I want my paper vouchers back.
In the days of the paper vouchers, Penn State charged student price for guest tickets plus a fee that was used to make up the difference between a student ticket and a full-priced one. This was a fair exchange -- students should be afforded more of a discount than non-students guests, as long as the final price of the guest ticket is equal to that of every other general admission seat. But when the ticket I was given last weekend is worth $2.50 more than a single-game, non-student season ticket, why must I be charged $30 more in fees?
Sure, with the old system students occasionally made impressive profits by selling their paper vouchers -- I can remember hearing of big-game student tickets going for as much as $140 or more. While these prices were excessive, students could get tickets for the ho-hum games for face value, or only a few dollars above, with ease.
While the idea of stopping student ticket scalping sounds like a good idea, I'm not so sure it wasn't a better system than what we had before. I've been one of the lucky few who has gotten student tickets all four years of college, but I never had a problem acquiring a ticket for someone else for what I thought was a fair price. In fact, this is where both the new system's biggest advantage and biggest failure lie. For the big games -- this year, Iowa and Ohio State -- the system pulls down student guest prices to the rough average of $85. This is what many people I know paid for their non-student friends to sit in the student section this year. Without this average price, most students would have to spend more than $100 to see the Hawkeyes or Buckeyes.
For the other six games, however, the prices are bloated beyond reason. I'm not so sure I'd pay the $87 I dropped for one Syracuse ticket on, say, an Akron and a Temple combined, for example (and don't even start me on the Eastern Illinois game). This is where the system exploits those students who want to bring a non-student friend or sibling to a game.
I understand that the student section is primarily for students -- that's a given. But many students bring non-students to games each week, and, after all, my guest's ticket came from the same online pool from which students purchase. And, sure, I ponied up for his ticket, but only because this would be the first time I'd seen my friend in more than a year. With a paper voucher, I just wouldn't have had to pay nearly as much.
And maybe I would've learned how to make a tuna melt.
