The soaring cost of prom: By the numbers

It's boom time in the awkward world of tuxedo-and gown-clad high school slow-dancers. And surprisingly, poor teens are spending far more than their wealthy counterparts

Between the makeup, the dress, the prom photos, tickets, and dinner, the annual high school rite of passage can cost families upwards of $1,000.
(Image credit: Bob Mitchell/Corbis)

"Prom is the new wedding" — at least when it comes to the price tag, says Hadley Malcolm in USA Today. Combine increasingly obsessive helicopter parenting, teens' rising red-carpet worship and Facebook narcissism, and the decline of debutante and other coming-out balls in the South and Northeast, and the springtime high school dance is becoming extremely expensive. "This is social-arms-race spending," says Jason Alderman at Visa, which recently released a new survey of prom spending. Here, a look at some of the eye-popping numbers:

$1,078

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