There’s nothing wrong with partying. There is something wrong with drinking to an excess on a regular basis. And most college students don’t know the difference, so when they refer to “partying”, they usually just mean “getting drunk”.
I actually did misread that, as meaning that pizza delivery people got lots of money from parties.
I get why they would find witnessing zombie fornication off-putting.
Used condoms, soiled underpants, heavily intoxicated youths on the doorstep. That kind of thing.
I have a feeling that the numbers are skewed by places like BYU and Liberty University.
5 or more drinks in an occasion, on 5 or more days a month? That’s the threshold for “serious problems”? When I was in school, the numbers were a LOT higher than that- it was probably more like 55% drank, and 50% binge drank, and 40% did it between 3 and 10 days per month.
Basically there was no concept of moderate drinking- people either drank enough to be somewhere between a buzz and completely passed-out, or didn’t drink at all.
And yet, despite that, the vast, vast majority of them didn’t end up with any acute or long term issues as a result. Some did, but (and I have no cites), the percentage was a LOT less than 10%- probably on the order of 1%.
I’m not saying it’s a good thing to party like that, but I am saying that it’s not nearly as bad as the pearl-clutching Baptists seem to think it is.
There you have it: Party culture is viewed negatively because the world, much like the SDMB, has lamentably large chunks of the populace who are puritanical old fogeys quivering in silent indignation that somebody, somewhere, might be having fun.
And it’s doubly offensive if it’s young people having that fun! They don’t know what they’re doing! They should be investing in their 401k’s and buying sensible socks and not playing with their damn phones all the time! Kids these days. Youth is just wasted on them. Why, when I was young, I did my homework twice a night just to be sure, brushed my teeth 5 times, and made sensible long term capital gains investments before having a warm glass of milk and toddling off to bed at 8PM every night!
And now look at me! I’m in the middle class and own my own home and 2 cars! Thunderclap Gaze upon my majesty! Bow before my wisdom!
Sure, I comprehensively screwed the environment for my kids and grandkids. Sure, my generation enjoyed a peak of prosperity and standard of living that is steadily declining for all subsequent generations. My kids will probably never be able to afford a home in the area I live due to rampant real estate inflation and zoning laws. I’ve also created a maliciously defunct political system run on lies and billions of dollars of systemic corruption that nobody can do anything about. None of that matters! What matters is I did the sensible thing, and people who do fun things are bad! How will they ever aspire to reach the same level of perfection and excellence as I if they spend their formative years drinking and pawing at each other??
There is a single right way to do things, and these damn kids just don’t get that they’re wasting their lives having fun while young when they could enter the middle class a whole 2.5 years earlier if they just lived in coffin-motels and subsisted on gruel while making sensible investments with the money they save! And just think how they’re seriously endangering their comfortable middle class future by partying and potentially dropping out of college! Why, they could end up lower class, with unfixable environmental problems, unsustainable housing markets, and systemically corrupt politics! Do you know how much worse that is than being middle class with all those problems??
Truly, party culture is a pernicious issue we need to pass some laws about right away.
Here’s a link to an abstract of a report on college drinking and academic issues. In the abstract, it notes data from several different studies.
In one study:
- 25% of college students report suffering academic issues specifically due to drinking
- 22% of college students who drank fell behind on their schoolwork
- 30% missed class due to alcohol use
In another study:
- 24% reported doing poorly on a test or assignment due to alcohol use
- 33% reported having missed a class due to alcohol use
In a third study, it was found that there was a direct relationship between average weekly drinking levels and grades; students who averaged "A"s had an average of four drinks per week, while those who averaged "D"s or "F"s had an average of 10 drinks per week.
Now, are all of those kids suffering “acute or long-term issues” due to drinking / partying? Very likely not. As has been noted, there are some kids who party hearty, but still manage to get good (if not great) grades, and graduate. But, poor academic performance directly leads, in many cases, to flunking out, and I think that flunking out of college qualifies as an “acute or long-term issue.” I think your suggestion that “the vast, vast majority” aren’t having major issues due to partying is likely inaccurate, and I will bet you that it’s actually substantially higher than your estimate of 1%.
I was in a college fraternity with a bunch of degenerate partiers, myself included. Excessive drinking, casual drug use, promiscuous sex and outrageous behavior were par for the course. But the majority graduated, got married and have successful careers. A few fell by the wayside, but most straightened up after college, no worse for wear.
Well, he became a senator anyway.
Exactly. And I’d wager that it wasn’t just the majority as in 51%, but more like 95% Enough to where the flameouts were far more notable than the guys who were successful.
And stuff like “30% missed class due to alcohol use” could mean anything from “Suffered alcohol poisoning and was still in the hospital” to “Went out to a bar with friends, stayed out too late, and skipped their 8 am class because they didn’t want to get up that early even though they weren’t hung over.”
There’s a lot of room for interpretation in that statement.
This righteous caricature of bourgeois complacency seems like something from the 70s. IME, those “comfortable middle class” types always like to chuckle about their college “antics.”
The term college party culture could mean so many things that it’s meaningless, and like the OP itself, is kind of useless as starting point for discussion until we have a more specific idea of what we’re talking about.
Look dude. There is data on the issue. I showed you some of it. Why do you believe that your repeated wagers, thinks, and guesses, and anecdotes are more accurate than actual numbers? This is an issue that people hide, which means casual observation is usually going to miss it.
I know this is MPSIMS, but jeez.
CDC has studied the health and economic impact of alcohol use
Missing class is not good at all, unless if it’s a true emergency. However, going to a party or the bar on a school night is never a good idea IMO, unless if you have no classes or if you only have evening classes the following day.
Furthermore, I’m not sure what every school’s policy is on for missing class due to a hospital visit that was caused by drugs or alcohol. I’m assuming that some professors would have mercy for the student, but it’s a grey area if you really think about it:
A student missed class because an illegal substance put them in the hospital. Even though colleges obviously have rules about drug/alcohol use, if it didn’t occur on campus, then you may be excused from the class just because it was a medical emergency. But, if they were underage, then they’ll still get in trouble for underage drinking. And even if the person was 21 or older, they still may face charges.
That’s why it’s important to be smart, safe, & responsible while maintaining a balance of work & play in life: To avoid negative situations with drugs/alcohol, even though some things may slip through the cracks.
WTF? Were you one of those odd people who went to bed at 9 pm and woke up at 7 am in college or something?
People skip class right and left, for better or worse reasons. They’re grownups- I wouldn’t go around worrying about it too much.
My point was that skipping an 8 am class because you stayed up too late the night before is about as an innocuous of a reason as there are, but if you were out at a bar, that could be counted as “missing class because of alcohol”.
Which is absurd, and that’s my point. Other than the bar part, there’s no difference between that and the person who stayed up too late and skipped an early class because they were chatting with their boyfriend in another school, or the person who got wound up in a good book, or having a really cool discussion with people in the dorm.
U mad bro?
The general idea seems to be that college party culture is a culture that encourages frequent and/or excessive drinking. “Frequent” and “excessive” may be subjective. "“Binge drinking” can also be subjective, but there have been attempts to put specifications on it for the purpose of study. I’m not sure how to put specifications on “frequent/excessive drinking,” but the negative aspects of such behavior are pretty well understood and explain why party culture is generally viewed as negative by people who haven’t already been swept up in the middle of it. Whereas a little bit of alcohol can serve as a social lubricant, the heavy alcohol consumption within the college party culture has health, legal, financial, and academic consequences for students and the people in their lives.
I suspect just about everyone who has experimented with alcohol has, at one time or another, ingested more than they would have liked and suffered a negative consequence as a result. But when the negative consequences of your behavior are severe and repetitive, and the culture around you strongly encourages you to continue with such behavior, it’s fair to view that culture as negative.
Skipping a class isn’t likely to be particularly detrimental, and I sort of acknowledged that when I shared the link to those studies. (Hell, I regularly skipped early morning classes because I was up late playing D&D, and I graduated with a 3.5 GPA.)
But, don’t get so hung up on the “skipped a class because of drinking” stat from my post. Other stats in that link showed that ~20% of college students reporting struggling academically due to drinking. And, students who are getting Ds and Fs (which are, generally, grades that will get you kicked out of school) are more likely to be heavy drinkers.
That said, I will acknowledge that all of the below is almost undoubtedly true:
- Some students do drink a lot and still get good grades
- Some students skip class a lot and still get good grades
- Some students drink heavily and never wind up getting into trouble
- Some students drink heavily in college and never have problems with alcohol later in life
- “Struggling academically” may not necessarily mean “gets kicked out of school”
- Some students flunk out of college and still go on to be successful in life
BUT…
- Flunking out of school is not a good thing, no matter how you want to spin it. If nothing else, it’s very likely financially costly, either from the standpoint of loans that were taken out for classes that proved to be worthless, or money spent from the student’s family’s savings that were equally wasted
- A significant minority of college students clearly are seeing a negative impact on their academic performance due to partying.
- Some of these kids who are drinking heavily as college students probably aren’t stopping in their heavy drinking as they get older.
An estimate of 20% (based on the numbers in those studies) who are seeing “acute / long-term effects” on their lives due to heavy partying is probably on the high side. Your estimate of “maybe 1%” is probably on the low side.
At my college, the RA’s in my dorm aren’t strict enough when it comes to alcohol use. They only follow one rule:
If they physically see it, then you’ll get busted.
Several students carry alcohol in book/drawstring bags around campus, but no one ever checks them because they own it. Outside of being drunk, you can walk past RA’s and campus security (at any party scene) without being checked, even though they probably know what’s in the bag.
“I smoked with a lot of college students
Most of 'em wasn’t graduating and they knew it”
- from a popular Redman song released the year I started college for the first time