This article is featured in the 2026 Commencement special issue.
Somewhere on the back pages of this issue, between a boxed message from a family in Greenwich and another from one in Palo Alto, a graduating Dartmouth senior will read their name in print. Their loved ones paid $95 for a small box of congratulations, $170 for a half page or $340 if they want a full page instead. The business staff of The Dartmouth are well aware that I am not the biggest fan of their entrepreneurial ventures, so let this be the second installment of my yet-to-be-titled anti-business-ventures series, one year later.
A few weeks ago, The Dartmouth released forms inviting people to purchase congratulatory messages for this Commencement issue — a charming opportunity, on its face, for families to mark the moment in some lasting way. I understand the impulse. These parents flew in from wherever, sat politely through Commencement and have been waiting four years for this particular weekend. Of course they want to put something in the newspaper. The problem is not the parents. The stranger question is why a newspaper is selling this particular sentimental thing at all.
Start with the pricing, because pricing reveals what the product actually is. These prices reflect a simple economic reality: The value of the purchase in part reflects emotional scarcity. There is no substitute market for congratulating your child in this particular issue on this particular weekend. Families cannot comparison shop for a Commencement edition that exists exactly once. This creates what economists would call an unusually strong form of pricing power: The Dartmouth provides a product with highly inelastic demand sold during a moment of maximum emotional investment.
That alone is not objectionable. Markets for sentimental goods exist everywhere. People spend money on senior photos, framed diplomas, flowers, class rings and graduation dinners because emotional experiences themselves have value. The issue is not that sentimental markets exist. The issue is that newspapers — The Dartmouth, especially — are a strange place to create one.
The business case for congratulatory ads is straightforward. Newspapers need revenue. Families are willing to pay substantial amounts for commemorative space. From a revenue-maximization perspective, selling that space is perfectly rational, but revenue maximization and institutional purpose are not identical objectives.
This distinction matters because newspapers are not simply collections of printable pages. They are editorial products. They claim scarce space, finite attention and institutional legitimacy in exchange for serving some informational purpose. The moment a publication discovers it can repeatedly monetize emotional attachment to appearing inside its pages, incentives begin to shift.
This is not primarily a criticism of The Dartmouth’s business staff. Most organizations respond rationally to incentives placed in front of them. The more interesting question is whether the incentive structure itself is compatible with what newspapers are supposed to be. Somewhere between the reporting and pages of personalized tributes, the Commencement issue stops functioning purely as a newspaper and begins functioning partly as a commemorative product marketed back to the people already most emotionally invested in it. Senior tributes are perfectly reasonable in yearbooks, family newsletters, graduation programs and private keepsakes. What makes them strange here is not that they exist but where they exist. A newspaper whose purpose is to cover the community should be cautious about depending on monetizing the community’s desire to appear inside it.
To the Class of 2026: You made it, and this campus is a little less interesting for losing you. To The Dartmouth’s business staff: same time next year. God willing.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
