One of parents’ biggest worries when they send their kids off to college is how much they’ll party. How would parents respond if I said high alcohol consumption in college could lead one to drink less, as well as more responsibly, as an adult? According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), students in college have shown to drink excessively more often than their peers in the general population, but they also tend to stop these drinking habits more quickly than non-college students.
There are many factors that go into the formation of an individual’s drinking habits. These could range from gender, race/ethnicity, employment after high school, military service, peer and sibling influences, marriage and adulthood, family influences, genetics, college attendance and many more, as stated by the NIAAA. With so many factors affecting an individual’s future substance abuse habits, I would think it could be difficult to perform a study that focuses on one factor in particular. Researcher Stephanie Lanza, professor and Scientific Director of Penn State University Methodology Center, attempted the feat.
According to the Huffington Post, Lanza wanted to study the effects of excessive drinking in college on the substance abuse habits in later adult life. She decided to base the study off of two main questions: “If all youth in the United States could go to college, what impact would that have on substance use behavior in adulthood?” and “Among kids who went to college, did college hurt them or protect them in terms of adult substance abuse?” Lanza built her current data on top of the 1979 National Longitudinal Youth Survey in which “1,092 college students answered questions relating to their substance abuse habits, updated the survey with their college enrollment status in 1980 and answered more questions related to their drinking in 1993,” as reported by the Huffington Post. The results must have been positive because Lanza commented on the completed study saying, “Hypothetically, if we could send everyone in the United States to college… that would be protective overall and would significantly reduce problematic substance use in adulthood.”
For a school of this size, the University of Tampa has a pretty high amount of partying, including alcohol consumption by students. Unfortunately, many students each year must pay the price of alcohol abuse which could ruin their lives or their friends’ by the allure of alcohol. Academic probation and even expulsion occurs at the University of Tampa, and according to the Annual Security and Fire Safety Report, in 2011 there were 551 liquor law referrals and eight arrests of students for alcohol abuse at the school.
When asked for her opinion on the study, Gina Firth, associate dean of Wellness and Student Affairs at the University of Tampa, said, “Addiction, alcoholism in particular, is progressive, and it gets worse over time. So if you are a person who is drinking really heavily in college, your likelihood of triggering something is much higher than somebody who is not drinking heavily.” Firth continued, “To me, [this study] seems like it doesn’t make common sense. With abusing alcohol, it’s not like something you just ‘get out of your system.’ Even if there is some kind of data that shows that most people that drink in college aren’t [abusing alcohol later in life], maybe it’s because they had to be intervened upon, or because something horrible happened and they had to stop using alcohol; maybe the programs like the ones we have here [at UT] actually work.”
At this I immediately thought of programs like Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), but she explained that those programs are actually for people that are already dealing with a problem. She elaborated on the many preventative programs that we have at UT that try to help students before they form a dangerous relationship with alcohol, like alcoholism, that they could suffer for the rest of their lives.
“Al-Anon and AA are specific for people that are already in an addictive relationship with alcohol or other drugs where they’re stopping and they need support to do that; they’re in a recovering process,” Firth said. “The programs that many colleges and universities have, including here at UT, is what’s called a student assistance program where students that are maybe abusing or have had some bad experiences can come in, and adjust in order to lower their risk in the future. So if a heavy using individual comes in our program, our goal is to get them to do it in a way that will lower their risk and keep them out of trouble, or help them from not triggering an addiction.”
I think Firth is absolutely correct. I’m a little hesitant about the results of this Penn State Study. To tell students that it could help them later in life to drink heavily in their college years is like playing with fire. Firth’s take on the source of less drinking in later years, such as experiencing a traumatic event in college due to alcohol, like an arrest, sounds logical to me. What does not make sense is students “drinking it out of their system,” as opposed to their non-student counterparts, especially because according to the NIAAA, college students drink less frequently than their non-college peers.
Firth said, “For students in college, there are a lot of programs out there dealing with this issue because it is so problematic, where people that aren’t in college might not ever get to talk to someone or be referred to a program, so you see a completely different outcome because there’s no one intervening on the outside. Students come in [to get help] on their own, or they are referred from student concern program where a professor or a roommate is concerned about them, or they are referred by the office of student conduct because they have gotten themselves in trouble. I don’t know if they addressed this in the study, but colleges intervene when there are problematic behaviors: people looking out for you whereas you never know if there is in the community [for those not in college].”
This is an aspect of the situation that did not occur to me. Maybe the source of the results derive from the fact that college students have people around them and watching them at all times. There’s a guaranteed consequence if you get caught drinking in college, where there isn’t necessarily going to be anyone that notices a drinking problem in the general population. In college the consequence could vary from a slap on the wrist, a lengthy lecture, a suspension or an arrest, but nonetheless, someone is going to talk to you and care about the negative effects that drinking can have on your life. Unfortunately outside of college, it’s not guaranteed that family or friends will step in and say, “I think something is wrong here.”
I wanted to get opinions on the study from UT students that varied in age, gender, where they grew up and drinking habits to obtain a variety of perspectives. A lot of the draw towards heavy and consistent drinking could come mainly from peer encouragement and the temptation of low cost drinks for college students that might not be available as they get older. Leanne Ballering, a class of 2014 marine science and biology major, said, “I agree with that [study] because by the time you’re out of undergrad and graduate school, the same bar scene could be boring. Plus, you aren’t surrounded by your core group of friends encouraging you to go out to $1 beers on Wednesday night.”
Marketing major Rory Thwaites, 21, on the other hand, shared a different opinion on the matter.
“Well if you begin to drink heavily in college, wouldn’t you say that it could become something of a habit?” Thwaites said. “Alcohol addiction is quite prevalent in society, and the habit you develop from your teenage years onwards I would say tends to mold the person who you grow up to be. So no, I don’t think you can ‘drink to get it out your system.’”
Although this specific study turned out to show the opposite results in general, I shared the same belief as Thwaites when the study was brought to my attention.
Having a personal family history of alcoholism, my perspective on the study sways more towards the idea that heavy drinking habits now would only enforce heavy drinking habits later. I grew up tagging along to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings with my family members, reading along to the Serenity prayer and 12 steps of the “good book” and listening to stories of adults and young people alike that wake up every day in an internal war between the pull of a drink and the self hatred it brings them. I’ve seen alcohol turn a beautiful young girl into a staggering, unconscious mess with alcohol poisoning multiple times from age 13 to 20, and witnessed similar abusive behavior of alcohol over the course of many years by her parents. The 20-year-old attended college; her mother never did. Clearly, the daughter’s habits formed before college if she was abusing alcohol at the mere age of 13.
I think the most important factor that goes into adult life substance abuse is genetics, so when I looked at my friend’s mother, I saw the future version of her. Other factors are surely very important also, like family influences, peer pressures, where you grow up and college experiences. However, I believe the most influential aspect is what is on the inside, what is coded for in our DNA that we inherit through our ancestral line, that determines the severity of your struggle with saying “no” to a drink at any age in one’s life.