Binge drinking is more common on campuses with a higher percentage of white students, campuses that are rural, campuses that have more fraternities and sororities, campuses where athletics are considered important. Are those factors linked with stress? I think not.
“the drinking age in England is 18. England has a huge binge drinking problem among young people.”
True.
In Canada the drinking age is 18/19. More Canadian college students drink than U.S. students (which makes sense since it is legal). But U.S. students binge drink more than Canadian students. Canada also has good stats on drunk driving despite the lower legal age.
I favor a lower and graduated drinking age for the U.S., but it is only one factor in the mix.
You speak as though changing the drinking age would substantially change anything for college kids. Are you unaware that even with the age at 21, underage college students can easily get drunk on beer already at frat parties. How would changing the drinking age change this? According to my sources, college students who are interested in drinking in bars can and do have fake IDs and routinely go out to drink. How would changing the drinking age change this? The main effect would be to make drinking more accessible to high school and middle school kids as it was when I was in hs. And to increase traffic DUI fatalities. Why should the US population be victims of even more drunken teens on the road because some (often rather overprivileged) teens choose to drink themselves into oblivion or death? How many of you have visited a friend in the hospital whose life was shattered by a drunken driver? I have.
Mathy –
Canada and the U.S. have pretty similar drunk driving rates. Both countries have decreased those rates by about the same amount over the years. Canada has less binge drinking than the U.S. does. Canada has an 18/19 drinking age.
Legalizing beer/wine for 18/19 year olds (but not hard alcohol) seems like a pretty good idea to try if you are trying to reduce binge drinking. Which in U.S. colleges is underground, behind closed doors, and usually done with hard alcohol. If all U.S. college students drink anyway, maybe try regulation instead of an ineffective ban?
If having the drinking age at 21 reduces DUI fatalities, think how many more lives would be saved if it were raised to 25, or 55, or maybe ban all drinking for all ages! Wait, we tried that already and it didn’t work out. If you want to battle drunk driving, make those laws more strict and enforce them. It is that simple, it works in Scandinavia very well.
Getting drunk once or twice is different from constantly drinking until you pass out. I’m 37 and if any of my friends did that I would think they had a drinking problem. I don’t know why it would be different for college kids. If my child was drinking to she passed out on the frequently. It would be time to take a break from college and come home to get some professional help.
@sensation723 , so true. Add that to the list of things that we should tell our kids. I also have friends who have pulled their kids out of school for alcohol abuse treatment.
Nothing about the drinking age explains why students would want to drink to blackout. I’d rather they not be doing this with the tacit approval of the government.
Those in favor of lowering the age are comparing social drinking to binge drinking in their rooms, and I don’t see how you can view these as the same thing. Maybe the kids who drink moderately and socially at home would prefer to do this more openly or without a fake ID. But those kids are not the problem. We would not even be talking about this if it were simply the fact that some college kids have a few drinks in their rooms with friends, or before going out, but they don’t end up in the ER and don’t go out and drive or commit other crimes. But these are not the kids you are claiming would suddenly be transformed from blackout drinkers to moderate social drinkers.
There is nothing, nothing, stopping the blackout drinkers from drinking more like a social drinker, being responsible and staying out of trouble, except their own self-destructive stupidity. How does this magically disappear if it’s legal for them to buy alcohol?
Yes, I would also pull my kid out of college for treatment if they were drinking to the point of passing out. That’s not a matter of legal age. It’s alcoholism.
Yes, I’m all for stronger enforcement of DUI laws.
Mathy – are you aware of the growing list of colleges have instituted bans on hard alcohol? Stanford most recently. Due to the riskiness of underground binge drinking which is most often done with hard alcohol.
Implicit in those policies is the concept that less potent alcohol (beer, wine) are de facto legalized for students (despite the 21 drinking age). The net is that you allow and bring out into the open reasonable and regulated drinking (beer and wine for 18-21 year olds) while trying to eliminate the riskiest behavior.
While it is possible to get black out drunk from mass quantities of beer or wine, it takes more work and time. As the cited article describes, that isn’t how the college kids do it. A handle of vodka is the tool of choice for getting blotto in a hurry.
I agree with the thought that this type of drinking has little to do with stress. And if students are looking to do this sort of extreme drinking as an antidote to stress they are barking up the wrong tree. You will most likely lose the whole week-end after an experience like that. Nothing will get accomplished and you will be setting yourself further back academically.
I have also heard that alcohol acts as a depressant the next day when you are recovering. So you likely will feel worse in the long run. What a waste to spend a college week-end recovering from a drinking binge. I recall there being so many other fun things to do.
@mathyone it’s called “forbidden fruit,” one of the oldest stories in the Bible. This is what propels kids to front load and overdo hard liquor, something I never did in college.
“I am not even remotely convinced that the author is correct in her claim that stress is the cause of extreme drinking behavior.”
Right…Cardinal Fang points out strong evidence that the contrary is true.
Binge drinking is highest at rural residential colleges. Students at community colleges, who are more likely to have jobs and children in addition to going to school, are also considerably less likely to binge drink. I’d say that a young woman with a low-wage job, a kid and a class schedule is under a lot more stress than a student in a leafy rural town, whose only responsibilities are going to class, studying less than four hours a week, and tailgating at football games.
I don’t think it has anything to do with stress. Young people have always done things to prove to themselves and their peers that they are cool, and to a young person, doing things that adults do seems very cool.
They desperately want to seem grown up, yet not uncool like all those killjoy old adults, so they do things they associate with grownups with a reckless abandon for the common sense, health, and safety they’ve been lectured about. They start smoking in middle school, they do dangerous things with vehicles, etc. And some of them try to show how cool they are by drinking to excess and then showing that they can laugh it off. Hasn’t this always been going on?
Binge drinking at current levels has not always been going on at US colleges at current levels. It has been sharply increasing for the last couple of decades.
@“Cardinal Fang” is this a fact? Are there statistics to back up this claim? I’m genuinely curious, not bashing you. Just that I keep hearing about it lately, but from this essay (not a research study) and from Caitlyn Flanagan in The Atlantic. (I am not a fan of Caitlyn Flanagan.) I should Google it, I know, instead of asking here, but I’m being lazy. I just wonder if it really IS that different now? I went to a large state school with a drinking age of 18 for 3.2% beer and while it takes a lot longer to get drunk that way, there was a LOT of drinking, of all kinds, for the whole time I was there. I saw many kids pass out from drinking. I worry sometimes we create these myths and then the kids feel like they have to live up to them. Just food for thought.
Used to have cheap drugs as an alternative BITD.
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rural residential colleges/quote
The most recent report from the North Country is five to six hours per day, in addition to class time.
@efinand, thanks for making me look up the statistics. Although I found many articles saying that binge drinking was increasing, this NIAAA study has a more nuanced view.
http://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/arcr352/201-218.htm
The study says that while the percentage of binge drinkers is roughly stable, students who do binge drink are binge drinking more frequently. So the same percentage of students binge drink, but the students who do binge drink are doing it more, which would mean more binge drinking.
Binge drinking is much more common among white college students than among non-white college students. If college binge drinking is stable, and colleges are enrolling more non-white students, that implies white studen
Re #32
Three to five hours per day is the report from the midwestern rural LAC, in addition to class time of course.