Each year, as the cold and gray of winter gives way to the bright new green of spring, human beings also experience an influx of energy: hopeful, youthful, and, at least partly, sexual. Psychologists explain this phenomenon with a variety of theories, but all agree that "spring fever" is normal and fairly universal. For the past six decades, American college students have celebrated this vernal "rising of the sap" with a unique ritual called "spring break," which involves travel to a sunny beachside resort to participate in drunken revelry and sexual debauchery. Though people of all ages, races, and classes may feel the urge to head somewhere sunny and warm as spring approaches, it is the fairly well-off, mostly white full-time students at four year colleges and universities that have created the famous phenomenon of spring break, celebrated in movies, television, and police blotters.

Traditionally, college...