The Student News Site of Harvard-Westlake School

The Harvard-Westlake Chronicle

The Student News Site of Harvard-Westlake School

The Harvard-Westlake Chronicle

The Student News Site of Harvard-Westlake School

The Harvard-Westlake Chronicle

    Vox fair in banning ads

    Yearbook advertisements are being eliminated this year, and good riddance. The exorbitantly expensive advertisements, which cost $950 per page, were mostly purchased by senior parents saying congratulations and farewell to their children, but in recent years, have served only as vanity pages.

    Some parents bought multiple pages for their child, making an extravagant, statement that overshadows other advertisements. Other students had professional photographers take pictures for their ad page, turning the ad into an airbrushed, unnatural-looking headshot.

    The advertisements created a focus on wealthy students and families who could afford to spend  money on ads, when the yearbook should instead be focused on the achievements of the student body, regardless of Affluence.

    Because the majority of seniors purchased a senior advertisement, the remaining seniors felt pressure to buy an ad, even if they were unable to afford the high price. To many families, $950 is a major sacrifice, and our school costs enough already without parents being saddled with an additional cost senior year.

    Our yearbook is large and heavy, with 504 full color, glossy pages in last year’s book. Cutting out advertisements will make the yearbook more convenient to lug up and down the stairs of the campus with the additional benefit of improving the quality of the remaining pages.

    Rather than spending hours upon hours on telephones and in meetings with parents, yearbook staff members will now be able to devote more of their time to editing their writing and improving the design of their pages.

    Since the yearbook is no longer earning money from the advertisements, in all likelihood, the student body will have to shoulder the cost in another way. The price of an individual yearbook may increase or the cost may be built into our future tuition. Still, even if the price of a yearbook is increased from $70 to $100, over six years that will cost an additional $180, significantly less than the cheapest ad available, a half page for $475.

    Seniors are not being denied the right to make their own pages, because “Reflections,” a special, seniors-only publication, gives every senior the right to design their own page and a copy of “Reflections” for only $100.

    We are ridiculed enough for the affluence of our student body. We don’t need to emphasize it by filling more than a quarter of our yearbook with expensive messages from the wealthy among us. Without advertisements, the spotlight shines not upon our money, but upon the talented members of our student body, where it rightfully belongs.

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    Vox fair in banning ads