I don’t suspect I’m the first to post this:
That is depressing. I hope to heck my kid doesn’t get caught up in that.
I agree with the most of the first comments I read – yes, some people do this and it is not new. I also don’t believe that the students are doing this due to academic stress. The top students wouldn’t want to spend the entire next day hung over.
Unfortunately, it’s nothing new. Undergrads at many colleges have been drinking for the purpose of “getting wasted” since well before I started undergrad in the mid-'90s. One older cousin was notorious for doing this during his undergrad years in the '80s.
Personally, never understood the appeal or the mentality behind it and never did it myself nor made it a habit to voluntarily hang out with folks who do.
Granted, a large part of that was growing up in what was a working-class NYC neighborhood where drug and alcohol addicts in their most dilapidated state were visible and thus, visible models of what many of us kids DID NOT WANT TO END UP BECOMING.
It’s also about knowing one’s limits and having priorities. For instance, I’ve turned down multiple offered drinks from Profs while being hosted for dinner/parties because it just happened that I had an exam the following morning and wanted to be in the best physical/mental condition for it.
I wondered about this piece because it is an opinion piece and not clear that it reflects the extent of this behavior on a regular basis. It sounds like this student got into a group that did this regularly, but is that really the norm weekend after weekend for the majority of students, even at an isolated LAC? Since this student transferred, I wonder if her perception was a bit jaded. Not to dismiss the very real issue of binge drinking on campus, but this painted a very extreme picture and it is hard to imagine successful students doing this all the time. If it is an accurate portrayal, there is something really wrong at some of these schools.
The writer generalizes to all small LACs. I don’t recognize this behavior in the handful of small LACs that I know fairly well. Not to say that there isn’t alcohol, but not like this. Not even close.
I’m curious @Dustyfeathers do you think it is because those schools have figured out a way to foster/promote healthy non academic outlets and thus have decreased intense (weekend) party tendencies in their student bodies or do you think the behavior was simply not prevalent on those campuses to begin with?
I’m wondering how different schools have responded to this ongoing culture of dangerous drinking behavior. Yes it has been around forever and it won’t “completely” go away. But are there schools out there that have done a better job of trying to rein it in (beyond just increasing their punishments for underage drinking) than others have?
I recently was with a group of friends and this topic came up. Four of them (out of 12) have kids who ended up in the hospital from blackout incidents. Only one of the kids was a freshman when it happened. Their kids are all super high-achieving, well-adjusted, “normal” kids at the kind of schools everyone on these boards wants to attend. Two of them were at LACs, and two at larger schools. For at least 2 of them, the problem may have been lack of experience with alcohol. In almost every case, the parents were floored because their kids had not been involved in such activities in high school (at least to their knowledge.) And these are not “checked-out” parents by any means.
I’m not saying that this happens everywhere or that everyone participates. There are no doubt alternatives to this kind of “fun” even at places where it is common. And there are schools where it is more common than others Still, I suspect that it is more prevalent on most campuses than most of us would like to think it is. It may be an escape, a response to the pressure to fit in, experimentation – giving this a motive is harder than admitting that it happens. But we should be talking to our kids about it, including what they should do if a friend blacks out. One of my friends made a point of reaching out to the boys who got her son medical care and thanking them for their judgement.
As for @CheddarcheeseMN’s point – the desire to avoid the hangover is what drives some of them to use other substances. Even scarier.
@lr4550 , at some schools, the rules for hard liquor are different than they are for beer in an effort to address this.
We all hope our kids don’t get involved with this!
At Oberlin in the mid-late '90s, the lack of heavy alcohol consumption among most undergrad classmates was due to a preference for other vices(marijuana and psychedelics) and a popular perception among a critical majority of classmates that alcohol was the vice for the “bourgeois establishment/old fogies in their parents & older generations” and more conservative students who tended to gravitate towards campuses with large fraternity/sorority and/or hardcore Div. I sports.
That’s not to say there weren’t any drinking. Just that it wasn’t very popular and there was some negative peer pressure around alcohol consumption.
More food for thought:
It’s very depressing. Relative to the Atlantic article, I’d fall in the Good Parent category (not my term, theirs). But that didn’t keep DS from binge drinking during the latter part of HS (we didn’t know until later that his friends’ parents … who were HS teachers … were Get Real parents … I still have a hard time not feeling angry at them for allowing it to happen under their watch and not having the decency to tell us it was happening…) and his first semester in college. So, so disappointed and scared for him when he called to tell us he’d ended up in the hospital. With DD, we’re still in the Good Parent category, but with lots and lots of talking about practical ways to deal with the whole issue of alcohol. No, we don’t want her to drink. But, if she does, for heaven’s sake, be as safe and smart about it as possible. Yes, you can always, “just say no” … but if you choose to say yes, have a plan … think it through ahead of time. Remember all that stuff from 9th grade health class about how fast your body processes alcohol, what constitutes a drink, etc… Count your drinks and spread them out over the whole evening. Don’t go chugging vodka from a bottle or beer from a keg. Carry one drink around for the whole night and people won’t bug you. Pour half of it out and fill it with water. Don’t eat the jello or drink the punch … you have no idea what’s in there. Don’t let anybody give you a drink … get your own. Don’t pick up your drink after you’ve put it down. Travel in a pack, and don’t leave anyone behind. Never, ever, EVER get in a car with someone who has had even one drink … PERIOD. And no matter what you’ve done or where you are, if you need help, call and we will help. We said the latter to DS, but never went into all the former practical details with him about the nuts and bolts of drinking … so when he decided to take the leap and try it, he was operating without a safety net. Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered. But I do feel like DD is better equipped. And, quite frankly, she’s watched him reap the consequences of his actions … both to himself, and by being the one at home watching us try to navigate and manage our reaction to it. So yeah, she has a much more concrete idea going in of what is at stake.
Transfer students often justify their decision to change schools, though the justifications’ underpinnings can just as easily be psychological as material.
As schools themselves go, UNC appears as a “Top Ten Drinking School” in an older publication I’ve come across, so opinions, as would be expected, do vary.
(Source: OPH.)
http://www.collegedrinkingprevention.gov/media/finalpanel1.pdf discusses various aspects of college drinking, including characteristics of students and colleges that are associated with college drinking.
The author of the article references mental illness while ignoring the general idiocy of adolescence. I have nothing against having some fun in college, but at some point a person must be responsible for himself without attributing personal attributes to “culture.”
Re #13: I concur. The student may simply have transferred away from her own, early, predilections.
I post this once In a while on threads such as this because I feel strongly about it: countries with a drinking age of 16 to 19 do not have campus drinking cultures such as this. During my years at university in Europe (a country with a 16 year drinking age) I never saw a single student staggeringly drunk. That would be uncool. If you wanted a beer you went to the cafe and you had one or two. Most students were happy with coffee and cigarettes.
I went to school when the drinking age was 18 and there was no difference accept that it was legal. There was the binge drinking, definitely the drinking to excess. I think it goes beyond age to culture. At the school I went to there was nothing to do except for drink. The school was lined by bars.
My DD is now going to a school that is known for not being a party school and it gets a terrible rep for having no social life. It is actually a school where they enforce the rules - 15 students got arrested for a dorm party first weekend. It made an impression on my DD. My DD has been having a great time but it takes a little more effort. She will be turning 21 early her Junior year and she will have plenty of time to drink. Hopefully by that time she will know that you can have fun without drinking to excess.
@snarlatron, the drinking age in England is 18. England has a huge binge drinking problem among young people.
I would just like to note that there is a big difference between getting blackout drunk once or twice in the early days of college, and deliberately getting blackout drunk repeatedly. I’m not sure those necessarily grow out of the same culture.
I am not even remotely convinced that the author is correct in her claim that stress is the cause of extreme drinking behavior.