I’m in Texas and it doesn’t seem to be as big a thing for UT as for A&M. Or it may just be confirmation bias.
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This was also the case for the school I and most of the schools I have worked at. However, it still takes quite a bit of work outside of contracted teaching hours – especially near the submission due date.
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I am a female Texas A&M grad. I wear my college class ring when I wear rings, which isn’t every day. It’s a pretty ring, and yes, it’s unique enough to quickly be able to identify another A&M alum.
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Hmm. I wonder if I just notice it more on men because men are less likely to wear rings that aren’t a wedding band. It’s not a bad thing. I don’t personally find the rings very pretty but they are impressive.
Now I’m going find myself checking all the women’s rings I see for a week!
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this is the point in our scheduled social norm where I am supposed to say gig’em and ask you what year you are and offer up what year I am
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Class of '91. Gig em!
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The women’s rings are smaller and less noticeable.
I only bought a yearbook for my senior year, and it’s a disaster of typos, misspellings, and grammatical errors. One friend of mine had an enemy on the yearbook staff; her name is misspelled every single time it appears.
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The A&M thing isn’t typical. I know lots of alums from other big state schools who don’t wear rings. UT people don’t even usually wear rings, at least not past 30, and I live in Texas.
The A&M ring is part of their whole Tradition Cult.
Rice grads tend to wear their rings, too, and the reasons probably overlap more with the Aggie reasons than the Owls would like to admit.
N.B. that in both cases, pretty much everyone ends up with the same ring – or at least ring template – which makes identifying other alums very easy. At Alabama, where I went, you could get any of a hundred types of rings, and so people did, and so they’re not useful in that way. I bought a ring in a signet style, and wore it a few years, but quit sometime in my 20s when I moved far away.
My guess is that there’s a huge overlap between “schools that have one ring style”, “schools that emphasize shared experience/tradition” and “schools whose alums wear their rings well into adulthood.” (Another example is MIT, which has a very recognizable ring the alums refer to as the “Brass Rat.” It’s enough of a Thing that, even though it’s not mentioned out loud, it’s how they show you that Rhodey went there in the first Iron Man movie – he’s clearly wearing one in several scenes, most notably here, when Tony is engaging the Raptor after his impromptu visit to $FictionalMiddleEasternCountry.)
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I have often contemplated the racket that is “Worlds Finest Chocolate.”
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One of the things that has always amazed me is that no one has created a facebook like app to create yearbooks. Something that includes multi-media so it not just a book but a video and more. I can easily see Jostens being unable to compete with that! Hell it could be free ware. And it could help people get back in touch etc. But Jostens is just one of the huge number of scams high school kids face - look into scholarship services - or club sports or any other of a huge number of ways we seperate kids from their money.
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It’s also because the men’s ring is giant. It’s like 3x the size of the women’s rings I have seen. I imagine there are options for both, and that only the largest is so noticeable - but there is at least one size that can be seen from 100 yards.
My interpretation is that it means late-and-early stage capitalism. We’ve given up on any semblance of fairness or the capitalist system being one which is good for everyone, like we pretended back in the social democracy days.
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Its not a racket, per se. They sell good chocolate with decent margins and the schools get some money. The Girl Scouts and their cookies and the Boy Scouts with their popcorn work the same way.
My uncle was in that company for forever, and I think he passed on his contacts to his son.
The sad part is how the bars got smaller and with less and less almonds…
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That old lady should have known I wasn’t a real Nigerian prince, it’s not my fault she wasn’t an informed consumer.
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Well it is a vocation 
I worked for a satellite company of the 3rd largest yearbook company in Japan. One thing I learned while I was there: yearbooks are always printed at a loss. WAY too many pre-production and revision man-hours, with relatively short run printing, meant the only reason a printing company would even get into the service of yearbooks is for the up-selling. Glossy papers, color vs. black & white, embossed covers and the like is where the profits lied. Once japanese schools started switching to DVD yearbooks, coupled with rising paper costs, many of the companies just stopped offering the printed copies.
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I don’t get it. I work for the biggest European producer for single-run photo books. On the team that writes the software our customers use to layout and create their books. Similar services exist in the US.
Why don’t schools use those?
Create some custom layouts, a template, Done. Our customers create both boring and truly astonishing books, I’ve seen samples when I toured the production.
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You can’t charge customers for work they do themselves. 3rd party companies are notorious for overcharging schools for services, whether it’s yearbooks or computers or whatever. Remember when every kid “had” to have a new iPad? Companies figure public schools have deep pockets and bad accounting.
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Jostens provides proprietary layout software -the teachers and student are laying out the yearbook themselves already
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