And booze very bad for grades etc https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/03/09/study-confirms-alcohol-and-marijuana-linked-decline-student-grades
I’m surprised this hasn’t gotten more interest.
That’s because stoners who read it quickly forgot about it, and went back to their Doritos.
Combining two forms of drugs and abusing them to excess tends to end in very bad academic/work performance and
health outcomes. No big surprise there.
Personal observations from attending a college where marijuana and psychedelic use was much more popular than alcohol, only those who abused it to the point of being stoned on a regular basis and/or those with other outstanding psychological/academic issues had serious issues academically.
The vast majority of the rest who partook in marijuana did fine and I knew several who not only managed to graduate, but do so with honors. And that’s not limited to my LAC or SS/Humanities majors.
You’d be surprised at how many successful engineering/CS graduates experimented or were highly functional regular users no different than someone having an evening beer/wine once/a few times a week after a long day at the office. And this includes folks who were topflight graduates from tippy-top engineering/CS schools like CMU, MIT, Caltech, Stanford, etc.
Incidentally, as I posted in the thread about a student seeking info on FBI recruitment, this factor is one reason why even the FBI has been publicly considering relaxing its absolutist no-drug use history policy because it negatively impacted their efforts to recruit the best engineering/CS folks for cyber-intelligence.
And full disclosure, I’ve yet to try marijuana myself and I was a near-practical teetoler in undergrad who turned down several offers of alcohol from adult town locals or Profs who had me over for dinner because I had exams the following day or just didn’t feel like it.
^Wow, somebody else who hasn’t tried pot! I thought I was the only one.
According to the article, college GPAs of students with comparable SAT scores (no mention of high school grades) at two unnamed colleges in Connecticut:
3.10 little to no alcohol, little to no marijuana
3.03 moderate to heavy alcohol, little to no marijuana
2.66 moderate to heavy alcohol, moderate to heavy marijuana
There were not enough students in the sample who used little to no alcohol but moderate to heavy marijuana. (Perhaps alcohol is the “gateway drug” to other drugs like marijuana?)
Heavy time commitment to anything, whether bible study, online games, partying, or college confidential, is going to impact on your studies.
Definitely no link between alcohol and marijuana among users at my LAC when I was an undergrad.
If anything, they tended to be even more vehement about regarding alcohol as the vice for “the older more conservative generation” and thus, uncool than the average student on campus. A perception which was already quite prevalent on my undergrad’s campus when I attended in the mid-late '90s.
It would be akin to a student on a campus where neo-hippie tye-dye and pop-punk fashions predominated voluntarily opting to wearing formal clothes such as a suit/tie and top hat in the style fashionable during the 1920’s or earlier.
This is funny. They didn’t realize the adults who made up the “older more conservative generation” were Baby Boomers who came of age during the Vietnam Era? I’ve yet to meet a stoner who hasn’t had a passing familiarity with alcohol. The LAC I attended in the 90’s had its fair share. It was a stone’s throw from Bethel, though, so perhaps that’s why.
So they don’t have any data about students who smoked pot but didn’t drink because so few students did that.
So the basic conclusion they CAN make is kids who drink heavily AND smoke pot see their GPA drop.
Wow what a shocker.
So the ones who drank and smoked minimally did best of all? The ones who did both heavily did worst? The ones who drank alot but didn’t smoke fell in the middle? Is this surprising to anyone?
Interesting comments. One:
Can’t say based on this study.
This should not be news. I would say it was well known by us in the 70s that pot impairs short-term memory, and that short-term memory affects the ability to learn. Therefore, if you cared about learning, then pot was for Friday nights, never for school nights.
BTW, it was well known by us that sleep deprivation impaired ability to learn too. A healthy teen sure can sleep!
First, some of the parents of undergrads in my era weren’t necessarily boomers, but members of the “Tweener” or “Silent Generation” who were born in 1945 and before. That generation, on average, tended to be more conservative in their youth than boomers.
Not to mention most of the boomers active in the counterculture/protests in the '60s ended up becoming much more conservative not too long afterwards.
It was a very sore point with some boomer parents of HS classmates who remained committed to countercultural/anti-war ideals from their youth into the present. One even went so far as to call out most of his fellow boomers who participated in the counter cultural protests with him as “sellouts” while I was still in HS.
Does the study mention where the 1100 surveyed students were from? Was it all Yale?
I wonder because there could be a regional difference. The word from my kids here in WA is that the good HS students are smoking pot and playing XBox, while the worse students are drinking alcohol and staying out late. My son’s apartment mates, all good students in a state where mj is legal and out in the open, seem to be combining the two without much effect.
Lol I can count on one hand probably the number of phd students I know who don’t drink or use pot.
I doubt very much that the alcohol and weed caused the bad grades. Certainly though there is likely some correlation between people who drink and smoke heavily and not doing well in school. But I’d bet a penny that if you took the alcohol and weed away, they would still be the people with lower gpas .
It all gets down to time. If you spend your nights drinking and then the morning recuperating (handover) you are not studying. There is a direct correlation between studying and grades. One has to put the time in.
In this context it would seem the pot smokers are better off. Not too many hangovers after smoking.
The study found the opposite. Pot seemed to be much more detrimental to GPA than alcohol.
Another boomer who never did pot, none of my college friends did either. Recognize the smell, however, from my college days in the early '70’s. Someone from my dorm floor refused to share her pan of brownies with me- it wasn’t because of the chocolate or calories… I wasn’t into alcohol that much either (crazy days back then - Wisconsin went from beer only at 18 to everything at 18 while I was a student then it became nothing until 21). I never paid for the pitchers of beer since I never drank more than a small amount (didn’t, and still don’t, like it).
I hear pot around today >>>>>>>stuff around in 60s, 70.s & 80s,.Should be at 10X the price
It did not, though the subject of this thread suggests it did. They couldn’t find enough students who smoked but didn’t drink so they weren’t part of the study or the conclusion.
^ but those that smoked and drank minimally had the highest gpas of all. Those who smoked and drank the most had the lowest. The drinkers-but-nonsmokers were in the middle.