Spring Break or Groundhog Day?

I recently came across a company called StudentCity.com – their website describes themselves this way – “We've been providing the Ultimate Spring Break Experience for over 20 years. Our mission: To help students organize and promote trips which enable them to celebrate youth through travel. In fact, it's all we do.”

OK – I get it – they’re travel agents.

Twenty years – 1990. Since then, Spring Break has become almost an expected part of the college experience. And for most of those college students who travel to these warm weather destinations, they have paid for these elaborate trips with credit cards. For next year’s college freshmen, getting credit cards will now be a much harder prospect and will have to involve having Mom & Dad co-signing on the account – thanks to the Credit Card Act of 2009.

This might mean that in the next few years, the Spring Break phenomenon will be limited to college seniors or to those students who are over 21 years old. I guess for the rest of them, we’ll have to find another way to “celebrate youth.”

1990 – seems like yesterday. The Education Resources Information Center published a white paper that year that listed the Top Ten Educational Issues Facing Society in 1990:

1. children held in low esteem;
2. changing work force demographics requiring a new vision of training and hiring objectives;
3. a corner-cutting ethic promoting mediocrity;
4. the development of ethnic "beachheads" which impede the assimilation of immigrants into American society;
5. leadership guided by public opinion polls;
6. the prevalence of competitions and contests in schools;
7. reliance on "rubber" yardsticks in place of national education standards;
8. continued erosion of federal support accompanied by lack of financial equity in the schools;
9. preoccupied parents who spend little time with their children;
10. a geometrically expanding information base requiring multimedia approaches transcending the printed word.

Have we made any progress?

Enjoy your spring break – and by the way, we boomers know all about it – we sort of invented it. It’s called Woodstock.