The words “fair” and “equal” do not necessarily mean the same thing, and some Penn State students do not think the new “equal opportunity” student football ticket system is fair at all. The university announced back in April that the ticketing system would shift to a new lottery process, where any student interested in buying football tickets can submit a request. Equal opportunity for all! Sounds great! Wrong, according to some students, because satellite campus students and freshmen have the same chance of getting tickets as main campus seniors:

@noshortsusa

are students just salty or is this system worse? #pennstate #psu

♬ original sound – No Shorts

Was the old system amazing? Not particularly. Students had to get up early on a designated day, join a queue, and then quickly enter all their payment information into Ticketmaster. If you were truly dedicated, like my older sister, you would try to join the queue on two devices, by having your little brother (me) also wake up at 7AM and use his iPad. The early birds got the worms. Simple. The old system was far from perfect though. Ticketmaster was prone to crashing, and even super-dedicated students didn’t always score tickets. 

Penn State’s solution: students are assigned a one-week window to enter payment information into their Student Account Manager and submit a request for tickets. After that, the university selects winners in a lottery selection process that is “completely randomized.” In theory, everybody gets an equal chance, but students told us this:

  • “I don’t think satellite campuses and underclassmen should get the same chance that University Park seniors get”
  • “I think it’s more fair, but at the end of the day, students are gonna be mad when they don’t get tickets”
  • “Even the branch campuses get the same chance as us, it’s bullshit”
  • “I mean, I got tickets so I love it”

No matter how you slice it, you run into a pretty simple supply and demand problem. There are more than 88,000 students across all of the campuses and only about 21,000 student tickets available. With way more students than available tickets, someone is going to get screwed, and have to turn to the resale market to pay the same price non-students do, upwards of $1,000 this year.

Dedicated fans used to have a better chance of getting tickets, and the lazy bums who overslept didn’t. Just dropping your name in a big hat and hoping Mr. Penn State picks you is boring. There’s something exciting about waking up early to beat others out of their tickets. It’s a mix of competitiveness and luck. Even when I was in the queue trying to get tickets for my sister, I felt a rush of adrenaline. Now they’re giving student tickets to people who never would’ve cared enough to wake up early.