Nobody pressured me into drinking in my college years - it was my own decision to go partying, and I enjoyed it.
I did do my schoolwork and I did graduate.
And there wasn’t much underage drinking at McGill, but the legal drinking age here is 18.
I have friends of various ages, including college students, and yes, I still do go to parties sometimes that involve many of my student friends. I no longer drink, but I enjoy hanging out with people, and I keep an eye on those who look like they may have partied too hard.
(The reason I’m sometimes at parties with a bunch of young university students is because we’re all involved in a theatre group together. And there are people around my age in my theatre group as well, at these parties. No, I don’t randomly invite myself to parties consisting of a bunch of drunk college kids much younger than me.)
Sure, but the problem with screwing up in college today is that it literally carries a much higher price tag than it used to. The cost of college has gone up much faster than inflation. My son just graduated from a public state university, and it cost about $30K/year. Many private universities are now in the range of $65K-70K/year.
It can really screw up your life to pay that kind of money (or more typically, take on that kind of debt) and not get a degree because of excessive partying.
The lil’wrekker is soon to be a Junior at her University. She’s still there taking summer courses, after spending time at another university on an internship. She’s a good student, excellent marks. She’s never been a party-er. Tomorrow she and a few girlfriends are going to lake for the 4th. There will be a huge group of 20 somethings and college friends. She’s 20yo. I still felt the need to give her the drinking talk. I know she’s trustworthy, but good girls can into trouble fast. Bikini clad girls, college boys, lots of alcohol. What could go amiss?
My talk was countered with, “Oh, Mother”
Tis true, but at least in my circle the constant drinking and “par-taaay” ing did not help. Some of the the people I’m talking about stopped going to freshman English, etc, too.
We had an upperclassman on our floor who liked to “party hardy”*. But he had the discipline to study. All the freshmen saw him binge drink on Friday and Saturday, but never noticed him in the library all Sunday. In a way, he was part of the problem. The freshmen took the wrong lesson from his “bad” example.
But they didn’t have to, it was their own choice. I respect that. I just wonder how they would have fared without the “freedom” they had. Maybe they weren’t cut out for college, who knows. I wish they’d given it a real try, though.
It’s been 39 years. I wonder how they are doing.
*I never knew how that was supposed to be spelled
I had absolutely no interest in drinking or partying when I was in college. I eventually left campus and decided to take online courses because I got sick of living with people who were only able to talk about weed and alcohol.
At my college, we have about 9,000 students & most of them live on/off campus, while the others commute.
Now, I do party, but I never get blackout drunk, only buzzed/tipsy, & I only got sick once. However, there’s something about my college which makes it a “moderate party” school IMO:
It’s located in a small, rural area with only a select amount of stores & restaurants. We only have one bowling alley & a pub/bar for entertainment. The nearest mall outlet/bigger town is about 10-15 minutes away. So, most people either stay in, party, or go home. Furthermore, our campus security is slightly strict, yet we still have fun, but most of our parties last about 4-5 hours, usually from 10 pm - 2 am. There’s also a lack of “jungle juice” parties at my college. A majority of them are BYOB, but it’s recently become a rare party event at my school, probably because of the underage liability risk.
On an extra note, the only reason our parties get busted is when a noise complaint is issued, but this mostly applies for house parties, rather than off campus apartments.
I’ll ask you this (and I’m not being accusatory, just curious):
Have you ever skipped class the morning after a party, because you were tired or hung over?
Do you go to parties despite knowing that you really need to be doing homework instead?
Did you ever do something while you were buzzed/tipsy that, the next day, you thought back and said, “whoa, that was dumb” or “whoa, I got lucky that that didn’t go really wrong”?
What I (and most of the other posters in your thread) have describes as the negatives of partying in college are when students (if they’re being honest) would answer “yes, frequently” to at least one of the above.
Also, it sounds like partying, at your school, is at least in part the result of there being fairly few other social activities available.
It’s viewed as bad by those too old to partake. I lived it with gusto back in the day, but now as an old fogey in my 60s, I’m more “Get off my lawn!” in outlook. But those were the days. A time to cut loose with few consequences. There were exceptions, like the two freshmen on a wild drunk who managed to ram their car into the largest tree on campus and kill themselves. Or the one girl who was drinking while leaning against a stairwell door in her building when it came open, she banged her head on the floor and died. But most students emerge unscathed.
The first 2 questions are a “No”, however, the 3rd one is an interesting observation & I’ll admit, there’s some things that I’d redo over at those parties. However, nothing bad happened, more like missed opportunities when I should’ve been more confident with meeting new people/approaching girls. However, I helped a drunk girl home once after a party with one of her friends:
So, I met them after the party when they were the only ones standing outside while everyone else went their separate ways. Surprisingly, the drunk girl’s friend didn’t mind me helping her, even though she was a little buzzed herself. Then, I started to wonder why weren’t they creeped out by my presence? Was it because her friend was there in that moment?
Furthermore, I didn’t have ANY intentions with them, so I wasn’t planning to “hook up” with them at all, even though I was buzzed as well. Meanwhile, while we were walking back, the drunk girl said that she: “regained faith in humanity” because other guys would’ve taken advantage of her in that situation, which was an interesting comment from her to say the least.
On an extra note, this thread connects with my other thread about approaching women in public, because several party situations occur from drunken behaviors, which may be either positive or negative, but mostly negative.
Heh. I had a fiendish buddy, and he and his roommate made killer margaritas. I would be home being a good boy, hunkered down for a night of study, when often they would call me to ask if I wanted to drink margaritas with them, or “margs” as we called them. (It even became a verb, “to marg.”) I would say no, then all they had to do was fire up the blender while I was on the line, and that was it, over to their place I went.
Speaking as someone who has seen both sides of it, I hate it because it makes self-destructive behaviors seem fun. The guys who are loading up your beer bong won’t be there for you when you get a DUI or develop alcoholism. In fact those guys will probably get mowed down by their own alcohol issues, but first they will pass that self-destructive torch to someone else.
That’s what I see when I see a toxic culture in progress. I see a mindless shameless entity that propagates itself by advertising a good time at the expense of the people it fools.
Social/light drinking is more of an adult thing to do IMO, like having a glass of wine for dinner or having a beer or two at a picnic/bonfire. However, college kids usually binge drink because of their personality & the illegal aspect of it. I even heard of people who calmed down once they turned 21 because they didn’t have to go through any loopholes just to get hooked up with alcohol.
And, as a number of posters in this thread have already noted, going off to college gives students much more freedom from the day-to-day oversight of their parents than they’ve ever had before, and lends itself to engaging in excesses and irresponsible behavior (be it drinking, drugs, promiscuity, or just never going to class in favor of playing video games).
I knew a guy like that; he’d get super-wasted on the weekend, and generally speaking if you met him, you’d think he was probably a stoner as well, and likely got bad grades.
In fact, he was carrying a nearly 4.0 GPA in microbiology, and ended up going to a relatively prestigious medical school, and has ended up as a med school professor of radiology at another even more prestigious medical school.
And HMS Irruncible, I think you’re focusing too much on the worst-case aspects. I mean, 99.999% of students who participate don’t have problems- even those chugging beer bongs.
It’s like anything else- the vast majority can partake without issue, but there’s a small minority that go way too far, and suffer the negative consequences.
The problem with freshmen/sophomores is that they’re too young and/or inexperienced to make good choices in those situations for a number of reasons, so a proportionately higher number suffer negative consequences.
And like Siam Sam pointed out, I think no small part is older people being grumpy- either because they never did it when they were younger, or because the pressures and responsibilities of grownup life combined with physical changes are preventing them from doing it anymore.
I’d venture a guess that if you polled adults about party culture in universities, the negative vote proportion would track with age pretty closely.
“This American Life” did an entire show about how the party culture at Penn State affects the local people—the pizza delivery people get assisted, there is routine vandalism. Streets full of vomiting college students disrupting neighborhoods.
On weekends, residents wake up in the mornings having to deal with the remains of people having sex, and shitting on their lawns.
There is also the occasional death resulting from alcohol use, whose abuse is intensified by the fraternity system.
I’m guessing that this was supposed to be “assaulted,” but auto-correct did its magic. If not, then State College, PA might have a rash of drunk-but-helpful PSU students pitching in to assist their local delivery drivers.
