According to an Associated Press article, the city of College Station, Texas, home of Texas A&M University, will be marketing a section of its cemetery for A&M graduates. Although other schools have them, this is the first university-related cemetery in Texas. The price of a plot is $2,000 compared to $950 in the regular section. Residents will have a “view” of the football stadium and, as the marketing director of the cemetery put it, “This is another opportunity for former students to be someplace close to campus when they’re gone.”
I wonder, since the cemetery is a monopoly, whether it is extracting all the consumer surplus from the Aggies, because $2,000 seems like a low price to me. I also wonder whether cemeteries at other schools would be or are already charging more. The price charged might be a good measure of the price elasticity of demand by decedent alumni at different schools.
A neat project would be to infer the extent of school spirit from the estimate of the price elasticity implied by the prices that different university cemeteries charge.
and 
. You can also watch it on 
Or for free, you could enlist someone to surreptitiously scatter your ashes at your favorite school spot and “live” on campus permanently.
It’s a monopoly only as much as Mcdonald’s has a monopoly on the Big Mac.
That said, I bet the price increases when the Aggies have a good football team…
There is a really good Aggie joke in here somewhere.
The Naval Academy has a cemetery and now a columbarium — not sure how much burial costs, but I’m pretty sure one would have to have been either an officer or an officer’s spouse.
This gives a whole new meaning to the term ‘school spirit’.
Someone had to say it..
You may be right that the $2000 price tag is a bit low but I would guess that during depressions cemetery plot prices don’t hold up very well.
How is the cemetary a monopoly in any sense?
Texas A&M is not a normal college like the ones we went too. I lived in Dallas for 5 years and heard about all the strange and bizarre traditions of the place.
PS – Don’t walk on the sacred grass.