My own alma mater, Anglo-Chinese Junior College, has a twenty-year-plus tradition called ‘fun-o-rama’, a biennial school carnival, the proceeds of which go into the school’s building expansion fund. I participated in this carnival in my own time at the school, manning my class’s stalls, and selling coupons. At the time, it was an enjoyable experience, and I have (mostly) fond memories of it.
Perhaps in light of ACS’s present circumstances, it is time for a more objective look at this school tradition.
Proponents of maintaining the ‘fun-o-rama’ tradition usually conflate two separate issues: the carnival as a source of revenue, and the carnival as a social-cohesion activity. The carnival is meant to generate revenue for its expansion, and to provide a shared experience that bonds students. Other reasons cited are developing entrepreneural skills but I will not address those here.
As a source of revenue, the carnival is highly inefficient. Many of the coupons are purchased by the students themselves and their immediate family and friends (which often belong to the same extended ACS old boys network). The goods and services in the carnival are provided by the students and paid for out of their pockets (or their families’ or friends’ or in-kind donations), which are then purchased by coupons. The result is a complicated series of transactions between closely related agents that tends to hide its effects - a regressive incidence that falls heavily on students and their families, with large overheads and expenses. Unlike a donation drive, this process loses much of the potential revenue in conversions, which is a highly inefficient way to transfer funds from students to the school. Some people might argue that the process itself ‘creates demand’ (or supply, depending how you look at it) like Say’s Law - the question then is whether the demand generates more revenue than the process loses through inefficiencies. My guess is that it does not. Alternative revenue streams might include soliciting direct and corporate donations.
I won’t even talk about opportunity cost here.
The second issue of cohesion is vitally important, as much of ACS’s appeal is to a sense of identification with the school even decades after graduation. The Ivy League schools amass huge alumni donation rates because of this brand identification. This is partly material (networking benefits, alumni connections, some prestige that comes with association) and partly sentimental. Fun-o-rama is a powerful experience - yet many of the ways it functions is detrimental to this purpose. Purchasing (and selling) coupons is often coercive rather than voluntary, often playing on tunes of guilt and duty. Students, family, friends, and alums are all subjected to an increasingly hard-sell campaign. This tends to drain rather than build goodwill.
The problem is that many people can identify these problems but tend to conflate the two issues. They rationalize the inefficient revenue process with the community goodwill it (supposedly) generates, or they rationalize its coercive nature with the need to generate revenue (however inefficiently). My answer is to delink these two purposes - Fun-o-rama must reform itself into a purely cohesive activity (its core compentency) and forget profit (which it was never suited for). This will allow carnival organizers to relax and focus on creating a great (and completely voluntary) experience that students will remember.
However, I fear that ACS’s culture will make reform unlikely. The hard-sell nature of fun-o-rama comes from a hard-sell of all ACS paraphenalia - I’ve bought all kinds of ACS pins, mugs, bears, tickets, coupons etc. We have reached a point where overloading alums will have negative returns. Yet we never seem to learn.
I will write more on alternative revenue streams for ACS in the future.
