Graduation season is fast approaching, with seniors and graduate students gearing up to walk across the Los Angeles Coliseum stage on May 15. Part of that preparation involves buying graduation regalia, which is mandatory for graduates in order to walk the stage.
This requirement can get pricey. Per the USC Bookstore website, renting a bachelor’s cap, gown and tassel costs $89.99 for bachelor’s students, $109.99 for master’s students and $129.99 for doctoral students. It gets even more expensive if you choose to purchase your regalia, with prices ranging from $229 for bachelor’s students to $690 for doctoral students. No cheaper alternative is offered.
Optional graduation sashes drive costs even higher. The base cost for a sash is $54.99, but for the students who choose to customize, each individual add-on patch to the sash costs $20, while individual letters cost $3.5 per letter. For a typical bachelor’s student who wants regalia and a custom sash, that means a minimum price of about $285 — and that’s without factoring in other taxes and fees.
Demand is high for those sashes, too. Ravi Barros Reis, a freshman majoring in film and television production and student worker at the USC Bookstore, said that the graduation department is busiest in the months before graduation, when about 20 students per day come in to pick up a sash.
But the cost can take a toll on graduating students like Rachelle DeSantis, a senior majoring in philosophy, politics and law — even if she was expecting to pay up.
“I knew it was going to be a lot of stuff, but I had no idea that it was going to be quite that much money,” DeSantis said. “A cap and gown rental is 90 bucks… like, are you kidding me?”
For comparison, crosstown rival UCLA charges $50 for a cap, gown and tassel but also sells each item à la carte in case graduates do not want to pay for one or more of the items. A base sash costs $50 with customizations also running students $20 each. Nearby California State University, Northridge (CSUN) charges $53 for a rental cap, gown and tassel and has sash options ranging from $40 to $49. CSUN uses the same manufacturer as USC, Herff Jones, while UCLA uses Jostens.
Beyond the regalia, there are additional expenses that students have to consider, including graduation photoshoots, where students rock their hundreds of dollars in regalia.
“I’m doing a few different sets… with a few different friend groups, but those have all added up to be roughly $300 getting spent,” DeSantis said.
There are also senior portraits that students can opt into taking, run by the Lauren Studios photography company, which puts senior portraits in the class yearbook. The photos are free to register for and take. However, ordering the photos can cost well over $500. The cheapest option offered, a digital download of a single, un-retouched picture, is $150.
Josh Soto, a senior who is graduating in May, said that ordering a sash online through USC was extremely expensive. He said that if he had ordered it through the online portal, it would have come out to about $600.
Because of this, Soto sought out less expensive alternatives. He found that ordering through the university’s online portal gave the sashes a white patch on the back, but he said not having it was not a dealbreaker for him.
“At the end of the day, I just wanted the cheapest sash that I could get, while it still looked nice,” Soto said.
Instead, Soto looked for a third party to purchase his sash. He ended up at the USC Bookstore in person, where they charge only around $15 per patch on the sash, compared to $20 through online booking. The USC Bookstore also charges by patch, not per letter like the online option.
Soto said he believes students lack information on cheaper alternatives for sashes at USC.
“I don’t think a lot of people know that there is a difference,” said Soto. “When I was telling my friends about it, they had assumed that the bookstore was gonna be the same exact price as online.”