Spring Break still holds a place in American culture, as a rite of passage for students. However, the holiday has grown in the last 20 years from a microcosm of the overall college experience to an almost necessity.

While in years past, college students sought an escape from the realities of studying, they now see Spring Break as an opportunity to learn about another culture, to go somewhere even their parents have never gone, and in some ways to break up the monotony of the typical heavy-duty partying lifestyle that is prevalent at so many universities today.

Thanks to entities like Facebook and Wikipedia, college students seem to spend less time actually studying, but more time in the library or on campus, away from the real world. After months of copying and pasting information off the Internet to cram for an exam or finish a paper in time for the night’s frat parties, that week in March offers a true respite.

Students see Spring Break as an escape from the pressures of college life in general; while collegiate types in decades past may have felt the pressure to study or do well on an exam, today they feel the added pressure of doing it in as little time as possible, while still managing to have a social life.

Though I may not necessarily agree with this predicament, the value of vacations, and in particular Spring Break, has become almost the opposite of what once was. When many students spend Sundays chugging Gatorade and wondering how they will fib their way through a paper on French existentialism, slowing down a bit for a stroll through the Louvre sounds mighty tempting.

Dr. David Doolittle, a practicing clinical psychologist instructor at Harvard Medical School, and father of a college senior, has noticed the change in student’s Spring Break destinations and intentions.

“Most people went to Florida, and Ft. Lauderdale was the hot spot. It wasn’t yet a time when flying was affordable, so people drove down,” said Dr. Doolittle, of his own experience as an undergraduate at Lafayette College in PA.

Reminiscent of Jack Kerouac and his rowdy crew, much of the experience was just the trip there and back. Still, more than mode of transportation has changed since the early 1970s.

“I think that kids now have a much more broader sense of the world and globalization, and they’re more interested in seeing places outside of the US. While many of the goals are the same, like escape and freedom, I think probably there are some goals that are different in terms of seeing other countries and that time of thing,” said Dr. Doolittle. “When I was in school, people weren’t interested in seeing different things, just going to the beach and screwing around and having fun.”

Despite what we grew up watching on MTV, traditional Spring Break trips may not be that typical. At higher-tier schools, especially those in cities, students are looking for something more.

According to an agent at a travel agency near a New York City university, very few traditional Spring Break packages are ever sold in the city, despite the advertisement in brochures of all varieties of packages. In their pursuit of greater cultural capital, students opt out of totally pre-planned vacations and instead seek out an original experience.

While destinations such as Mexico became more popular in the last 20 years as a result of a combination of efforts by the Mexican government to increase tourism and efforts by travel agents to make exclusive deals with airlines and hotels to form such packages, at this point they may be running out of steam.

However, a clichéd Spring Break does serve a purpose. As a psychologist, Doolittle sees the value in such an experience for a student. Said Dr. Doolittle, “If you look over a lot of civilized human history, there have been times of festivals, Mardi Gras, and carnivals. There are traditionally things that people do that give them an experience that is radically different than their ordinary life; have an experience where the normal or conventional rules are thrown off for a time. Students probably need this more than other people because they’re in a process of life transition, and often working extremely hard.”

The mere experience of trying to communicate to someone in a different language, fight over a phone bill from the hotel, or barter for a souvenir, is something that students may not get elsewhere, especially on college campuses that are increasingly helping students make every decision in their young lives.

The idea of transition in a students’ life is an important one; while more students than ever have the financial means to fly South for a week each spring (perhaps aided by current cheap airline ticket prices), many students whose parents will not help them out see the value in such a trip. Many students surveyed save up for trips from part-time campus jobs, book the flights by themselves or with friends, and, once on vacation, are forced to solve problems that would have typically been tackled by parents on previous vacations.

In short, while much of the typical facets of higher education, such as hard work and focus, are continually being swept aside, new mediums never before considered may be making up for these deficiencies. Today’s college students just may be turning the old phrase “work hard, play hard” on its head.