College students spend more than $1.5 billion on spring break trips.
Ohio University students who pay for hotel rooms and plane tickets next week will contribute to the more than $1.5 billion that college students spend on spring break trips.
That often occurs because millennials, or people who reached adulthood around or after 2000, spend more money on experiences than goods, according to one OU economics professor and other reports.
Julia Paxton Pagan, who is also the director of the Center for Campus and Community Engagement, said it’s common for younger generations to spend more money on experiences.
“I don’t know anything about (students') spring break spending,” Pagan said in an email. “If they are in debt, then yes, it would increase their debt, but it mainly just shows the type of consumption they prefer: experiences.”
Ashley Potter, a junior studying communication sciences and disorders who went to Rome during spring break her freshman year, said she agrees that students are more likely to spend money on experiences as opposed to objects.
“I definitely do, because with the Rome trip, I didn’t bring anything back,” she said. “I just really went there to learn.”
Potter said she’s taking another trip this year to Hawaii, which she’s spending nearly $1,000 on.
She said she thought that was kind of expensive, but wanted to have the ability to visit her boyfriend who is stationed there.
“I just try to stay conscious of how much I spend,” Potter said. “In Italy, I was especially conscious because you’re not spending American money, and you don’t want to spend too much.”
Madison Leonard, a junior studying communications studies, said she plans to go to Panama City, Florida, with some of her friends for spring break. She and her friends created a budget to plan how much they wanted to spend on the trip.
“We’re not going out to eat,” she said. “We’re getting cheap meals we can eat as a group, and we’re not staying at a family place.”
Though Leonard knows of some students who are spending a lot on their vacations, she said she has noticed more students taking measures to save money and still have fun.
“We had a piece of paper and wrote out how much we wanted to spend,” she said, adding that student debt makes it difficult for them to spend large amounts on trips.
Pagan wrote a literature review on the spending patterns of Generation Y and how people in that generation, similarly to millennials, have less money growing up and are less likely to spend money on houses or cars early in life.
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“Taking in to consideration all of these characteristics, it is clear that Gen Y has entered early adulthood in a world much different from that of previous generations,” the review states. “Experiences during their development have caused them to form distinct characteristics that could potentially have some effect on time preference.”
Potter said she thinks students aren’t as likely to spend too much money in general because of loans and debt.
“We’re poor a little, so I think we’re less likely to spend money on experiences and objects,” she said.
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