Fading Mementos

Black Issues in Higher Education, Feb 17, 2000 by Eric St. John

Financial and other pressures have put college yearbooks in jeopardy

They're full of photographs and stories about sports teams and cheerleaders and bands, fraternities and sororities and other campus organizations, classmates and professors and visiting celebrities -- and a host of other memories and milestones from any particular year at any particular college. But in places, what they don't have is popularity.

"Yearbooks are more popular than newspapers at the high school level," says Ed Sullivan, director of the Columbia Scholastic Press Association at Columbia University in New York. "At the college level, it appears to be just the opposite with more of an interest in newspapers than in yearbooks."

Kenneth Dean -- student media coordinator of Alabama State's newspaper, The Hornet Tribune, and yearbook, The Hornet -- concurs: "Yearbooks don't hold the same appeal that they did 10 to 20 years ago. Because our society has become so computer literate and media sensationalized, people are not that interested in looking at bound things any more. They'll get on a computer and look at multimedia packages, things that are visual and easy."

Vickie Suggs, Howard University's assistant director of student activities, adds: "I worked at Georgia State University and I can tell you that the yearbook was not something that the campus embraced. It was a struggle to get a staff and to get it printed. They were seriously looking at not having a yearbook at Georgia State."

But she only agrees to a certain degree.

"[Howard] is still a traditional campus as regards to a yearbook," says Suggs, who has a bachelor's degree in English and journalism from North Carolina Central University and a master's in mass communication from Old Dominion University. "A lot of campuses are moving with the technology toward the CDs and video yearbooks. But that printed documentation stands the test of time at this university

"It's nice to see that the yearbook is valued here," she continues. "Students want to see themselves and their campus and the events that they worked on while they were here."

However, despite the enthusiasm for yearbooks at institutions like Howard, Alabama State, Grambling State, Florida A&M and other historically Black universities, many schools -- including many HBCUs -- have decided that the cost and aggravation are not worth the effort.

The Price Isn't Right

The Columbia Scholastic Press Association is made up of secondary and postsecondary institutions that publish school newspapers and yearbooks. He says the decrease in the number of colleges that produce yearbooks is an increasing trend, although he has no statistics to support his claim: "If anybody tells you they know [exactly how many colleges produce yearbooks each year], they're lying," he says. "Nationally, college yearbooks have been in decline for the past 15 years."

And the reason?

"Of course, money plays an important part in all this," Sullivan says. "Many of the smaller institutions can't afford the costs of producing a yearbook. Student papers tend to be supported by advertising dollars. That's not the case with yearbooks."

"It's a lot of expense and [there is] very little money" to support them, says Jim Cleveland, director of public relations at Central State University.

At many schools, Suggs says, the institution will pick up the tab for all of the printing costs of the yearbook. However, the money for all the other expenses involved -- like salaries and, sometimes, office space -- must be raised with advertising revenues, promotions and other means of solicitation.

Sullivan adds the decline in yearbook production is also happening at the larger institutions: "People who want to buy these books want to see pictures of themselves in them. One of the defining hallmarks of these books has been that they provide [students] with a picture of themselves and a record of life at that particular institution. Sometimes a large college or university can't accommodate all the logistics involved with that.

"Some campuses have thousands of students and getting all their pictures ... could prove to be a daunting task," he explains. "And the colleges that produce [the yearbooks] have to be all-inclusive. You've got to get all the sports teams, the chess club, the booster clubs, maybe even the ultimate frisbee club. Administrators have to ask themselves, `How do we cover the people and the atmosphere of the campus in a way that makes people want to buy the yearbook?'"

At most schools, yearbook costs are taken out of student-activities fees, according to Suggs. As a result, most yearbooks are produced by the office of student affairs or student activities. Suggs says most of the larger schools that produce yearbooks print 5,000 copies -- whether the institution has a 10,000-student campus like Howard or a 25,000-student campus like Georgia State. The reason for the small number is because not everybody wants a copy -- even when the price has already been paid, as is the case at Howard.