<p>Just the Stats: Drinks and Drugs In The Dorm
By Olivia Majesky-Pullmann
Nov 10, 2006</p>
<p>Nearly 1,400 college students die each year from alcohol-related deaths, roughly 500,000 students have injuries and 70,000 students are sexually abused because of alcohol abuse, according to a 2002 report by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. ... </p>
<p>Overall, more than 19.7 million Americans admitted using illicit drugs in 2005, marijuana being the most common, according to a the 2005 National Survey on Drug Use and Health. Asians have the lowest rate of drug use (3.1 percent), followed by Hispanics at 7.6 percent; Whites at 8.1 percent, Blacks at 9.7 percent, and American Indians at 12.8 percent. College graduates are less likely to be current users, according to the survey, which found that 5 percent of college graduates were users compared to 9.8 percent of high school dropouts....</p>
<p>However, a different study shows that drug use is on the rise among college students, although the rate of increase is not as high as among peers who are not in college.....</p>
<p>College students have a higher occurrence of heavy drinking than their peers not in college at 39 percent versus 34 percent. ...</p>
<p>Race/ethnicity plays a key role in alcohol compensation, according to the Drug Use and Health survey. In 2005, Whites 12 or older were more likely than any other group to use alcohol (roughly 56.5 percent) compared to Hispanics at 42.6 percent, American Indian 42.4 percent, 40.8 percent for Blacks and 38.1 percent for Asians. On college campuses the trends follow with White students being twice as likely to be binge drinkers. ...</p>
<p>I wonder if this is worse than when I was in college in the mid-70's. I just remember any party we went to at different colleges (road trips) everyone was pretty "blotto" on one substance or another. "Shot a Minute" and other drinking games were the norm. I hope its not worse now. Bad enough then!</p>
<p>It's so important to talk to you kids about this while in high school over and over and over again. And again and again. Two of my son's teammates went to an off campus party and ended up in the emergency room recently. Both were okay but I sincerely hope it put enough fear into them they will not over indulge again.</p>
<p>Read the newspapers. Turn on the TV. Read the other underage drinking threads for others' perspectives. I am certainly convinced it's worse. It's not just an increase in the numbers of binge drinkers but the amounts they drink and the age at which they start. The risks they take whenever they drink are much higher today - both short term and long term. If you need statistics to be convinced, I'll bet Mini can fill you in.</p>
<p>I think it's worse. Here are my observations. When I was in college (early 70s) I had classes starting at 8am. 9am was a RELIEF day. I had Friday classes. H (a few years earlier) had SATURDAY classes. My son (Penn) doesn't start until noon some days. He has no Friday classes. Thursday nIght begins the weekend. Sometimes Wednesday night is a pre-weekend party. He said some kids don't have classes until 3pm some days. They stay up all night and sleep all day. His dorm mates proudly displayed their fake IDs. He has two of his own.
Another thing. I have nothing against coed dorms or unlimited "visitation". We did not have this when I was in college, which limited somewhat the availability of places to hold these constant parties. Now there are no obstacles to non-stop drinking/partying, except when the kids have tests coming up or other activities that take precedence. And these are really bright kids who care about their educations.......</p>
<p>Interesting point, Momofwildchild. Do you think these schedules are mostly at large U's or at LAC's, too? My experience at a LAC was like yours, schedule-wise. Classes were daily starting at 830am. There wasn't alot of free time for this during the day party business. It seems like too much freedom for teenagers and not enough structure.</p>
<p>I think at large State U's there are more evening classes offered to cater to part time working students. I think it also depends on your major and year in school. At many State U's, it seams they don't want to overwhelm Freshman so they reccomend an easier credit load. For some kids, much of the first semester covers material they've previously learned. Some have a difficult time adjusting when the course difficulty or credit load increases.</p>
<p>I know my son has 8am classes MWF and 9 on TTh. He is at a smaller private U. A friend's son at NYU said they don't have any Fri classes--not sure if he meant whole U. or just him.</p>
<p>When I talk with my kids about alcohol and drugs on campus versus my experience back in the 70's, it seems that alcohol is more prevalent (or perhaps more overindulged) but drugs are less now. My youngest said he has yet to smell pot at a party or in dorm--my older kids said the students who used drugs were either very rare or very well hidden. I remember the 70's as drugs being pretty much "in your face".</p>
<p>My son goes goes to big state U. I asked him how many of his friends have on campus jobs and he could only think of one. Most kids have 15-20 hrs. of class a week. That does leave alot of free time. Non athelete freshman usually get stuck with the early classes as these are the only ones left but many of these kids just don't go.</p>
<p>Philosophically I believe this generation has become desensitized.The speed and scope of the media has come to a point that they really have seen it all. The world has changed faster in their generation than in any other. They have watched war and death live on TV since they were preschoolers. Marketing glorifies extremes in everything. Wealth, excess, consumerism all glorified. Everything is bigger, better, faster. They have been expected to multitask since they were young always headed towards something at breakneck speed.They are bombarded daily with more information than they are capable of understanding at a young age. They are so overstimulated that they either don't feel anything anymore or feel everything intensely</p>
<p>So enter extreme drinking....faster and more intense. Glorified by their peers with hopes of finally feeling "something" or "nothing"</p>
<p>I think it depends on the "culture" of the school whether it is mainly drugs (pot) or mainly alcohol. S has a good friend at Vassar and he said it is all about pot there, while at Penn it is drink till you drop.</p>
<p>To me, the even scarier number is the percentage of students who, after graduating or leaving school, will end up as alcoholics in the next 20 years (if they aren't so already.) At my alma mater and at Duke (which are not totally atypical for prestige colleges), based on data that the colleges provide, that percentage will be about 15% give or take (higher for whites and males). A significant fraction will die of alcohol-related causes between the ages of 35 and 54. I frankly think that is an abnegation of educational responsibility.</p>
<p>Alcohol and drug abuse have always been major concerns. As Mini says, it is not just the short term risks, but the long term consequences. The 1400 deaths sounds dramatic but is very small when compared with the long term damage and deaths. The good news is that both alcohol and drug use peaked in the late 60's and mid 70's and have continued to decrease. If our communities, including the colleges, would help with enforcing underaged drinking, we could see some very dramatic improvements.</p>
<p>Nearly 1,400 college students die each year from alcohol-related deaths</p>
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<p>That stat comes from a 2002 report and reflects 2001 data. When parents are looking for "safe" campuses for their kids, preferring rural schools, they should compare this stat to the number of students at 4-year colleges who were murdered in that year: 127 (and that includes students murdered at home or otherwise away from school). Murders actually taking place on 4-year campuses in 2001 numbered a grand total of 18.</p>
<p>It's not violent crime that makes a campus unsafe for a middle-class college kid; it's a culture of stupid decision-making, which kills more than ten times as many students. Many of those safe, cosy campuses where people leave their doors unlocked are actually death traps if you take into account the drinking that is the true grave danger to this population.</p>
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<li> I've said this before: I don't think it's worse now. When I was in college, everyone was legal, and alcohol was at every official event. We had "Master's Teas" on Thursday afternoons where the "tea" was punchbowls of whiskey sours. We had a standing Tuesday night party. I was on a beer-drinking team; we had regular practices and a competitive league. I would have thought "Students Against Drunk Driving" was an oxymoron. (Also, after my freshman year I rarely scheduled classes that began before 10:30 am. It is true that this no-Friday-classes fad seems to be sweeping the nation, and that's new. Columbia, as I remember, has a no-Friday-classes official policy. But it's not like the weekend didn't begin on "Thirsty Thursday" back in the day.)</li>
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<p>I was not unique, by the way. Not everyone drank, or drank as much as I did, but I was a serious student who did a lot of work (and had jobs), and there were many kids who drank more, and more often, than I.</p>
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<li><p>I wonder whether drinking is worse at rural schools. Back in my excessive drinking days, I drank a LOT less than my friends at Dartmouth or Hamilton. I had a girlfriend at Williams for a while and I can barely remember what it looks like. In the city, sometimes we went and did something. In the boonies, what we did was drink.</p></li>
<li><p>I don't think my youthful behavior was a good idea. I know my kids drink, I know they drink less than I did (by several orders of magnitude, albeit different numbers of said orders for different kids), and I still worry about it a lot. I advocate all the time for moderation -- very moderate moderation -- and careful attention to addictive behaviors in themselves and their friends. I don't advocate for teetotalling because, frankly, drinking is close to universal in their social sets, and they would simply turn their ears off.</p></li>
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<p>I think what has changed is the # of binge drinkers. Drink hard liquor as fast as you can till you pass out is the deadly fad of the day. Both my college kids see this behavior daily.</p>
<p>I think there has been an acceleration of drinking at college. In my day, yes, there was drinking, drunkenness and all sorts of consequences for the drinking. But for all of the foolishness, humiliation, peeing in public, puking in public,etc, I don't know any of my classmates who ended up in the hospital or dying of alcohol poisoning. Yes, they got sick, some of them did get injured from actions done when they were drunk, yes, there was drunken driving and the consequences, but I did not know a single person who just ended up in the hospital for drinking too much--alcohol levels at health/life threatening ranges. It happens all the time now. I know of a number of kids who drank enough that they harmed themselves just from the drinking-not from activities while drinking, and in highschool as well as college.
I have heard discussions blaming the raised drinking age for this binge drinking, but I really don't know what to "blame for this wide spread drinking.</p>
<p>I know of one person who broke a leg jumping off a balcony - not sure they were actually drunk though! I heard rumors of bad LSD trips. My experience was pretty heavy drinking at Sat. night parties, but not even every weekend. I never saw anyone pee in public, throw up (well twice in grad school) or misbehave or end up in the hospital. I certainly never drank during the week (except for really bad cramps) and never knew of anyone else who did.</p>
<p>I don't know of any good data sources going back into the 60s and 70s, but we have reasonably good data going back to around 1981. Since the drinking age was raised, youth drinking on the whole has gone down and per capita alcohol consumption in the U.S. is at its lowest point in recorded history; motor vehicle deaths for youth per mile driven are down; abstinence rates have risen significantly. (At the same time, adult binge drinking, heavy drinking, and deaths from alcohol-related causes are close to an all-time high.) From what we can tell, college drinking has held steady (declining slightly in the past 5 years.) But there is a catch to this data - the average undergraduate college student in the U.S. today is 24.5 years old. In 1981, it was much younger. So it is rather likely (though not proven) that drinking at colleges where the median age is between 18 and 22 is well higher than it was then. It seems unusually, even extraordinarily high in a relatively small class of residential colleges and universities. High binge drinking rates are associated with schools that are: rural, residential, non-commuter, coed, non-religious, heavy in spectator sports, higher median family incomes, heavily white, and having fraternities. And the differences among schools, even among those which on the surface would appear similar, can be profound.</p>
<p>Quick way to get colleges to curb binge drinking would be to include it as a factor in the USNWR rankings. After all, large numbers of seemingly perpetually drunk students, regardless of SAT scores, is hardly a sign of high academic quality regardless of what anyone says. </p>
<p>I remember lots of beer drinking and drug use in the 60s (I was involved in the latter, but not the former.) It was very hard to get drunk by drinking enough warm keg beer. I don't remember "pre-gaming". (Maybe I destroyed those brain cells?) Did have a vodka drinking alcoholic roommate though, but he wasn't a partyer, and became "happy" mostly by himself.</p>
<p>I was working in a large U. hospital in the late seventies and early eighties. We often saw alcohol overdoses in ER and several in ICU on respirators. It was always worse on football weekends and wasn't only the college students. One of the highest blood alcohols I've ever seen was in a 40 something year old woman who passed out at football game. She was unconscious and on ventilator for 24 hours.</p>
<p>One reason I rarely attended football games as a college student was that someone was always throwing up on you, spilling a drink on you, or burning your coat with whatever they were smoking. Football on TV is much nicer!</p>
<p>One big difference between now and when I was in school is that it was legal for me to drink at age 18. Which made it lss of a big deal, in that we didn't need to conspire, forge, sneak, or drink behind closed doors.</p>
<p>Another issue is the practice of "pre-gaming." Maybe that was going on "back in the day," but I wasn't aware of it.</p>