College Students and Drinking

College students alert, recent graduates alert: What do you think of the observations and conclusions by Thomas Rogers as summarized below?

A recent article at Salon by Thomas Rogers sketches recent research on why college students like to get wasted. The research acknowledges the social impact of drinking and the long term impacts of addiction, but this study wants to know why college students seem to want and like getting drunk. The sketch presents some interesting ideas… including some suggestions for college students on how to help their drinking friends.

Thomas Rogers says: “In retrospect, all of this sounds both obnoxious and exhausting, but when I was 18 years old, drinking held a real, magical appeal. When drunk, I would feel socially skilled, and wonderfully impulsive, and far more fun than I’d ever been before. I was drawn to alcohol because it allowed me to escape my natural shyness and bond with people I barely even knew.

It’s those kinds of positive experiences that fascinate Thomas Vander Ven, an associate professor in the department of sociology at Ohio University. In his new book, Getting Wasted: Why College Students Drink Too Much and Party So Hard, he aims to uncover not the dangers of college drinking, but what attracts  students to alcohol in the first place. And booze, he finds, not only helps young students alleviate their social anxiety, it helps them grow close friendships, and find romantic love. By taking care of other drinkers when they’re feeling ill, he argues, many student drinkers also get their first taste of adult responsibility, findings that have major implications for the ways in which we think about alcohol.”…

Talking to my respondents, one of the things that struck me was how many students talk about being shy or feeling unprepared for social situations and that alcohol is a resource for them to let their guard down. One of my respondents told me that “alcohol takes a few bricks out of the wall.” Mine is not a nationally representative survey, and a lot of my findings should generate hypothesis for larger-scale research, but if you take my informants at their word, there are a lot of shy people with some social phobias, and alcohol helps them to, as some of them describe it, let “the real me come out.”

They’re more likely to say and do things [when they drink] that they normally wouldn’t do — show affection to their peers, get angry at them, get more emboldened to sing and dance and take risks and act crazy and there’s a ton of laughing that goes on. It creates this world of adventure. It creates war stories. It creates bonding rituals. When things go wrong — the getting sick, the getting arrested, the getting upset — it gives them an opportunity to care for one another, to deliver social support. So you’ve got young adults who, for the first time, are taking care of a sick person, staying up all night with them, consoling them when they’re upset. It’s an opportunity for them to try on adult roles….

In that case, how do you think we can actually improve our college drinking culture?

If you talk to university administrators and health promotion specialists at universities around the nation they will often say they have reduced heavy drinking at their college. I don’t want to say it’s been worthless, but the rates of drinking have remained pretty constant — around 44 percent of college students are binge drinkers. So what can we do to make it a safer enterprise? One of the things we can do is educate and train students to be better bystanders. Effective bystanders notice that something is wrong. They recognize that there’s something that needs to be attended to, and they feel responsible enough to help.

One of the things that worries me about the college drinking scene is the high level of sexual victimization. So why not tell first-year students to take care of their friends, look out for them, don’t let them get in situations with a high potential for sexual victimization. Notice the signs of dangerous intoxication. It’s a simple thing — if your friend is really passed out drunk and unresponsive, don’t put him to bed, call 911. And we should train students to not only respond to tragedy or potential tragedy, but to exert pressure on one another when their friends are drinking more than they should. If your friend’s really intoxicated and they think they need more shots, it’s your job as a friend to tell them that it’s not a good idea.