How High School Graduation Ceremonies Have Changed Since 1988: What Parents and Teachers Should Know
Last month, I sat on a metal bleacher in 82-degree heat at the regional football stadium, fanning myself with a custom foam hand that said “Class of 2024”, next to my 1988 Southside High yearbook I’d tossed in my bag on the way out. My sister was flying in from out of town for my oldest son’s graduation, and I’d dug the book out to show her how different things were back when I sat where he was about to walk. When the first name flashed on the 30-foot screen at the end of the field – complete with a headshot, the kid’s planned major at Ohio State, and a little quote he’d submitted about loving pizza and hiking – I nudged the first-year math teacher sitting next to me and flipped open my 1988 program. It was a single sheet of typed paper, folded in half, with just a list of names and the order of processional. No headshots, no quotes, no extra frills. That was the norm 36 years ago, and almost nothing else feels the same now.
My 1988 graduation was held in our small high school gym. We stacked bleachers along the sides, and people brought folding chairs to cram into the floor aisles. Tickets weren’t sold; the school just said “bring whoever you want”. My grandma brought her entire bridge club, six extra women, and nobody blinked. Cap and gown was plain navy, you could borrow one from a recent graduate for free if you wanted to save money, or buy it new for $12. Decorating caps was against school rules – the principal said it was disrespectful to the ceremony – and any kid who showed up with a drawn-on cap had to swap it for a plain one before walking. Valedictorian gave a 10-minute speech about working hard and giving back to our hometown, we walked across a makeshift stage, shook the principal’s hand, got a diploma in a plain cardstock cover, and went out for ice cream after. It was quick, it was cheap, it was almost entirely the same for every kid.
By contrast, my son’s total graduation costs before the party hit close to $300: $80 for cap and gown rental, $25 per guest ticket for four of us, plus the $100 mandatory photo package the school required if you wanted a professional shot of your kid crossing the stage. In 1988, the yearbook teacher took photos of every kid for free, and you only paid $5 if you wanted a print to take home. Every cap at this year’s ceremony was decorated: some said “Going to Community College, No Debt”, some had pronouns, some had doodles of pets, one had a photo of the kid’s late grandma taped to the top. The principal didn’t say a word. The speech had jokes about TikTok bans, the price of textbooks, and how many times we’d gone virtual for snow days during their junior year. It was messy, it was personal, it was different for every kid up there.
Not all the changes are bad, even if people my age love to grumble about over-the-top modern ceremonies. The biggest shift I noticed that matters most is how centered the day is now on individual kids, not unchanging tradition. Before this year’s ceremony, the principal spent two hours working through a Google Sheet every student filled out with phonetic spellings of their name, and even audio clips of them saying it themselves. When my son’s friend An, whose parents immigrated from Vietnam, walked across the stage, the principal said his name perfectly on the first try. In 1988, my friend Anil Patel got called “Anil Puh-tell” all four years of high school, and the principal messed it up at graduation too. Nobody thought to ask him how to say it, and he never bothered to correct anyone because that was just how things worked. That small change – taking 30 seconds per kid to get their name right – costs nothing, and it makes a world of difference for kids who don’t fit the old, white, anglo default most schools operated under 30 years ago.
Another shift I’ve grown to appreciate is that most schools now let kids walk with their cohort even if they haven’t finished all their graduation credits, and just get their diploma later once they make up the work. In 1988, if you were even a single credit short, you didn’t walk at all – you got your diploma in the mail months later, no ceremony, no recognition with your friends. This year, three kids in my son’s class walked, including my neighbor’s son who missed a full semester of school when his mom was undergoing cancer treatment. He told me after walking that having that moment with his friends made him excited to finish his last credit over summer, instead of dropping out altogether. Punishing kids for life setbacks by excluding them from this milestone didn’t make anyone work harder, it just pushed them away. That’s a change that works.
Of course, the rising cost is a real problem. Low-income families can struggle to come up with hundreds of dollars for tickets and fees that were almost free a generation ago. But there are small, concrete things parents and teachers can do to work with that. For parents of current high schoolers: mark your calendar to ask the guidance office about graduation fees at the start of second semester. Almost every school has full or partial fee waivers for families who need them, but you have to ask before they place cap and gown orders, not two weeks before the ceremony. You also don’t have to buy every add-on: I got a perfectly good photo of my son crossing the stage from my seat with my own phone, that’s the one we framed, and I skipped the $40 custom announcements and sent free ecards to out-of-town family instead. For teachers and admins, you don’t need a big budget to make the ceremony better: steal the name pronunciation Google Form, let kids decorate their caps, and open walking to kids who need summer credit recovery. All of these are free, and they make the day feel like it’s for the kids, not the tradition.
After the ceremony, my son leaned over to look at my 1988 graduation photo, a blurry shot my dad took from the gym bleachers, me in a plain cap and gown, smiling. He laughed at how boring everything looked back then, and I laughed at how much his graduation cost. It’s true that things are more expensive, more complicated, and a lot fussier now. But it’s also true that more kids get to see themselves in the day now, too. Some of that change is unnecessary, some of it matters a lot. I don’t think we’ll ever go back to the cheap, plain ceremonies of the 80s, and that’s okay – as long as we keep the changes that work for kids, and find ways to make sure no one gets locked out because they can’t pay. That’s the part we’re still figuring out, one graduation at a time.
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