The Couple With The Yellow Ducky

I live across the street from the University of Denver's Ritchie Center, an athletic facility on the University of Denver campus.  This time of year the facility hosts high school graduations - dozens of them, almost every day of the week.  There was one of these graduation ceremonies that took place yesterday morning, and I took the above photograph of a couple leaving the Ritchie Center with a huge yellow ducky.  What I want to know is what they were doing with it?  Was it a graduation gift that they took with them to the ceremony?  If so, I would think the people sitting behind them would complain.  Perhaps they were simply using the facility's El Pomar Nataorium (the swimming pool) and were just heading home.  It is indeed a big pool, so I suppose a huge yellow rubber ducky would not be out of place.  I suppose they could have been selling little rubber duckies to the graduates and the big one was just an advertising tool, but when did little rubber duckies become a hot graduation gift?  I myself got a dictionary for college when I graduated high school, but that was Chicago, and we were a different breed.  A whole different generation, too, I might add.