Published Monday, April 26, 2004
Colorful Commencement Garb Empties Wallets
By Jessica Aliberti and Andrew K. Mandel
FOR THE APPIAN

When masters candidate Lynn Rasmussen heard that the Coop was charging $65 for a one-day rental of a cap and gown, she did a double-take.

“Is this just a deposit? I get my money back, right?” she asked the clerk.

“Honestly, I wanted to make sure that I didn’t make a mistake and actually buy the gown,” she told us later.

But if you consider the Coop’s cap and gown charge to be an insult to a tuition injury, representatives from the Coop say the rental fee is the price of making Commencement special.

Rather than standard black robes, graduates from America’s oldest university wear gowns featuring not only full, flowing sleeves and “fluting” over the shoulders, but also “crows’ feet” embroidery, the color of which specifies one’s field of study. Students at the Harvard Graduate School of Education sport light-blue crows’ feet, where peers at the Kennedy School of Government wear peacock blue.

Most other universities incorporate this degree-specific color into the gown’s hood, but Harvard has always dared to be different in this regard.

With such specificity, these gowns are custom-made, unusable by other schools and therefore expensive.

The Coop also over-orders 1,000 extra caps and gowns to ensure that all graduates will have the correct size, as well as a colored hood that corresponds with the institution that granted them their most recent degree. If your last degree came from Cornell, your hood’s lining will be purple and white. Harvard’s is crimson.

No hood, and you might as well be an undergraduate.

According to the Coop’s Nancy Scheirer, matching all of the proper embroidery, size and color involves a lot of processing by the Coop staff, who take the orders, check in each cap and gown, and sort them by degree, field of study and the school from which each graduate received his or her highest previous degree. The lack of automization adds up to significant labor costs for the retailer.

This is on top of the expense of washing, folding and bagging each gown every year, as well as accounting for the five percent of students who never return their gowns. Doctoral students pay twice the price because of their gowns’ special velvet panels and twice as much fabric for super-size sleeves.

Scheirer says the ends justify the means.

“For the amount of money that you have put into your education and the time and effort you have put in to graduate, the $65 to rent a cap and gown is well worth it,” she says. “The ceremony at Harvard has so much pomp and circumstance and really makes one proud to be graduating from Harvard.”

Still, 65 dollars seems awfully steep to Duane, a representative from the Coop’s competitor for regalia sales, University Cap and Gown. (His exact words: “That’s incredible. You’ve got to be kidding me.”) Though this Lawrence, Mass.-based wholesaler does not rent out gowns (after too many experiences of not getting their gowns back), Duane says his company would charge $30 for the same product.

If Harvard were to use plain black robes, like most colleges do, the rental fee would be more like $10, he said. (A quick check of Boston University prices begged to differ, at a whopping $103 for a “basic package” of cap, gown, tassle, hood and 10 generic graduation announcements.)

The cost differential between the Coop and University Cap and Gown makes a huge difference when contemplating whether to buy the gown outright. The Coop is selling masters caps and gowns for $599, whereas University Cap and Gown’s version is $179.

But why would you need one?

Masters candidate Chris Tracey, who used to be a teacher in Alaska, had one answer.

“In order for all of our students to see that you can go on to a wide variety of schools around the world,” he told us, “our principal ordered gowns from each school that the teachers graduated from for them to wear at the graduation ceremony.”

You can also use the gown if you are invited to be a guest speaker at another graduation, a good strategy if you are planning to be famous.

Duane from University Cap and Gown had one final suggestion: “These gowns make one helluva Halloween costume.”

The Coop only rents out for Commencement.

Jessica Aliberti, a masters student in Administration, Planning and Social Policy, is a contributing writer for The Appian. Andrew K. Mandel, a masters student in Technology in Education, is on the Appian Board of Editors.