Tickets to this year’s Culture Show will only cost $10, a price cut by the MCC to make the annual event more accessible to students.

“This is a policy that we have discussed extensively with the co-chairs, the Culture Show directors, the board members on the MCC, the clubs as well as staff,” said Kenneth Park, associate director of the MCC. “Collectively, we have decided that $10 is the way we want to go.”

**Photo by Dylan Ryu.** Performers prepared to showcase their talents in the 2025 Culture Show.

The annual Culture Show is a season-long event put on by the MCC every spring quarter to allow the cultural clubs at Santa Clara University to perform and celebrate identity and tradition. Each club gets to decide how to showcase its culture through galas, performances and even markets.

Culture Show directors for the South-Asian club Intandesh, Rohit Reddy ’27 and Anokhi Ghiya ’26, shared how their show highlights “the cultures and traditions of South Asia through dance, music and instrument performance.”

Of the 27 culture clubs on campus, only 16 are officially affiliated with the MCC and will be directly affected by this new policy.

Other culture clubs on campus, however, have alternate funding sources. Culture Show director for Mexican folk-dancing club Ballet Folklórico, Jacklyn Alonzo Heredia, said that most of their funding comes from ticket sales and the Associated Student Government.

“I feel like a good bit of our fundraising budget for this year has come from Culture Show money,” Heredia said. “Whatever ASG can’t give us, we fund with whatever Culture Show money we got last year.”

Despite not being a part of the MCC, Ballet Folklórico has become a part of the Culture Show events hosted, with this year being their second time performing. They are not limited to the price cap put on the MCC clubs, but also do not receive financial support from the MCC’s funds.

There are other exceptions to this new policy, such as clubs that donate all money earned through ticket sales. Those clubs, such as the Undocumented Students and Allies Association, are allowed to price their tickets however they choose.

Most clubs also get a majority of their funding through tickets sold for the annual Culture Show. The new price cap could change that as clubs will now see a decrease in the money raised at their event.

Reddy and Ghiya, while acknowledging this funding decrease, believe the overarching decision to cap prices to be a fair one.

“We won’t get as much revenue as previous years,” Ghiya said. “But then also for us to go to other culture shows, we won’t have to be paying so much out of pocket.”

This was the MCC’s main mission when considering how to make the Culture Show events accessible for all students. Their first step was to reduce the price of tickets, therefore allowing students to be able to go to multiple shows without spending so much.

“The average price of a ticket for the shows that have to be paid for is $17,” Park said. “That means that if you were trying to go to every single show, it would cost around $200.”

With the addition of the price cap to Culture Show tickets, Park hopes it will make it more feasible for students to attend multiple events so all clubs get a chance to celebrate their culture in front of several students.

“Some people think it should be less, some people think it should be more, but the majority of people believe that culture shows should become more accessible,” Park said. “One of the ways being limiting ticket prices.”

Although this is a new and sudden change that most clubs had to work with, for Reddy and Ghiya, it was a change that simply made sense.

“The cap came in the middle of the year so we had to sort of figure it out,” Reddy said. “But I think it’s for the good for students because it’ll allow them to go to as many culture shows that they want without being financially burdened.”