Story originally printed in the La Crosse Tribune or online at www.lacrossetribune.com
Published - Thursday, May 15, 2008
The twilight of the yearbook? While declining in college, they stay strong in high schools
 West Salem yearbook editors (l-r) Carly Manske, Rachel Kleinertz and Kirsten Gunderson fix a name in the yearbooks while getting them ready to be distributed on Friday. Erik Daily |
A yearbook is priceless to some — a permanent record of classmates’ faces and well-wishes. But while still popular in high schools, there are fewer colleges that offer them and none in the La Crosse area.
The number of yearbooks at colleges has been declining since the 1970s, said Rich Stoebe, director of communications for Jostens, a Minneapolis-based company that publishes yearbooks for both high schools and colleges.
The number of college yearbooks has fallen to about 1,100, Stoebe said, while the number of high school yearbooks has reamained stable, he said,
Stoebe attributes the decline in college yearbooks to a larger and more diverse student body, meaning people are less interested in the entire campus and more in their corner, he said.
Colleges lose interest
Viterbo University students made the decision to discontinue “Imprints,” the school’s student-funded yearbook, about 16 years ago, said Pat Kerrigan, vice president of communications and marketing for Viterbo University, who was an adviser to the yearbook for a couple years.
Costs were escalating, fewer students were purchasing it, and student interest in creating the book was dwindling, Kerrigan said.
Technology also has changed, giving students other opportunities to share pictures and memories, Kerrigan said, referring to social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace as well as the popularity of digital cameras.
“Essentially people are now carrying around their own digital yearbooks,” he said.
UW-L published a yearbook until the early 1990s, said Cary Heyer, director of university relations at UW-L. Similar to Viterbo, student interest in the book declined both in creating the content and being included in the book, Heyer said.
Western Technical College had a yearbook, “La Tech,” until 1981. A combination of rising costs, difficulty finding a yearbook adviser and dwindeling interest sealed its fate, said Philip Brochhausen, graphics instructor at Western.
High schools still acitve
This is the third year West Salem High School has created a yearbook using Jostens’ online publishing program, said Cindy Patza, journalism teacher and yearbook adviser.
The program allows students to submit personal pictures for possible publication in the yearbook among other features, Stoebe said.
Those features have contributed to more West Salem students creating the yearbook and purchasing it, Patza said.
Eighty-eight percent of the student body purchased a yearbook last year, she said.
In addition to West Salem, area high schools including Logan, Central, Aquinas, Onalaska and Holmen still have yearbooks.
About half the students at Logan High School purchase a yearbook, said Julie Kinney, yearbook adviser and English teacher at Logan High School. “It’s popular,” she said, adding that popularity has been pretty consistent during the past five years.
Lasting memories
The La Crosse Public Library has yearbooks from Logan, Central and Aquinas high schools from every year since they started making them, said Bill Petersen, associate archives librarian at the La Crosse Public Library. It also have copies from the past 20 to 30 years of yearbooks from surrounding schools in La Crosse County, he said.
“It’s the same reason we save everything — for historical purposes,” Petersen said. “They get used here pretty heavily — people organizing class reunions or others that lost their own.”
A yearbook is a piece of recorded history and a keepsake which Jostens sees as something much different than a social networking site or other modern technologies, Stoebe said.
“It tells the story of that unique school year,” he said.
Kerrigan said, at times, he misses having a yearbook at Viterbo.
“They are a wonderful permanent record of the university,” he said.
KJ Lang can be reached at (608) 791-8226 or klang@lacrossetribune.com.
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