The nature of Dartmouth's Commencement ceremony makes the event resistant to budget cuts, Kiefer said.
"We haven't cut back the ceremony itself because we don't have a lot of decoration," he said. "It is a pretty scaled-back ceremony to begin with. Our biggest expenses are chairs, the stage and the speaker system, all of which are things that we need."
Celebration activities scheduled for Senior Week will also continuing as planned, according to Eric Ramsey, director of the Collis Center and student activities, which organizes many of those events each year.
"While scaling back its budget, [Dartmouth] has been very committed to making sure all of the normal Commencement activities are still going on," Ramsey said.
Although the Collis Center cut funding for the annual graduation gala this year, funding for the event has been taken over by Programming Board, Ramsey said.
Several of the Senior Week and Commencement weekend events are funded by multiple departments, which has alleviated the effect of cuts in these departments on the events, Ramsey said.
"I think that each department that organizes Commencement activities has had to take a long and hard look at their budget and their expenditures so that they can reduce expenses without reducing the quality of the program," Ramsey said.
The 2009 Class Council, which is also responsible for programming during Senior Week, was allocated $10,000 in funding to plan those events -- an amount that was decided before the College's budget cuts and has remained unchanged, 2009 Class Council President Annie Rittgers '09 said.
"We haven't encountered any changes in our plans for Senior Week," she said. "The economy hasn't affected much yet."
Although the College's Commencement planning seems to have been unchanged by the College's budget concerns, representatives from some local hotels said reservations for the weekend have declined this year.
"In past years we have always sold out with a long waitlist," said Kalleen Kilfeather, manager of the Comfort Inn in White River Junction, Vt. "That's not the case this year, we actually still have open rooms."
Mary Lee, director of sales for both the White River Junction Hampton Inn and Comfort Suites, similarly said that rooms in both of those hotels remain open for the College's Commencement weekend. Lee, however, blamed the under-booking on technical difficulties on the first day that families were permitted to reserve rooms at the Hampton Inn, rather than financial concerns.
Only one family has contacted the Comfort Suites to cancel its reservation for Commencement weekend citing the economic downturn, Lee said.
Although it is too early to determine the exact number of guests who have reserved rooms in residence halls at the College for Commencement, Assistant Director in Residential Life Patricia Hedin said that there has been great interest in campus housing during Commencement weekend.
Hedin said it is too early to compare this year's demand for on-campus rooms to that of previous years.
Representatives from other Ivy League schools, including Princeton, Brown and Cornell Universities, said that their Commencement plans have proceeded or will proceed as usual this year.
"Everything that was done last year is being done this year, no parts have been discontinued or cut," said Mark Nickel, director of university communications at Brown University.
