Binge Drinking in the College Culture: Identifying Causes, Consequences, & Potential Treatment Approaches

As many teenagers enter college, they begin to experiment with many things. Although not all students participate in underage drinking, it is evident that a vast majority do. Drinking is not the problem. The main problem occurs when students resort to binge drinking. In the

Drinking on college campuses has become a huge problem. For example, in the 10th century only old people used to drink, but now students drink more than their parents. Students see their parents drinking, so they may think that drinking has no effect on health that anyone can drink so why can’t the students drink? Therefore, college students have been drinking alcohol since the 14th century. Barrett Seaman’s article “How Bingeing Became the New College Sport,” appearing in TIME magazine on August 29, 2005, explains how binge drinking is affecting college students. It also suggests that lowering the drinking age might help solve the problem of binge drinking. This article has much information on how and where students get drunk.

Binge drinking is considered to be a health problem because nearly half of all college students have reported to drink more than 5 drinks is a short period of time (Hennessee, 2013). There has been about 1,825 college students who have died from alcohol-related injuries such as motor-vehicle crashes with the students being between 18 - 24 years old (College Drinking Fact Sheet, 2015). An increase of 6% of college deaths has occurred due to binge breaking increasing the total amount from 1,600 to 1,700 (Hingson, Heeren, & Wechsler, n.d.).

“According to the CDC, about 90% of all teen alcohol consumption occurs in the form of Binge Drinking, which experts say peaks at the age of nineteen.” (qtd by Listfield). Binge Drinking is the consumption of excessive amounts of alcohol in a short period of time. The author, Emily Listfield, defines that the standard alcohol consumption over a two hour period is considered to be four beers for women and five beers for men. This has become a great distraction for college students nationwide and a major dilemma on college campuses. Nearly two hundred thousand students visit emergency rooms each year due to the abuse of alcohol, and more than one thousand seven hundred students die. In the article “ The Underage Drinking Epidemic”, Listfield identifies the problems that underage drinking can cause, the dangers that could happen, and four solutions on what parents can do to keep their kids from binge drinking.

In Henry Wechsler’s, “Getting Serious about Eradicating Binge Drinking”, he discusses the issue of binge drinking. Binge drinking is an extensive problem on college campuses. The majority of colleges merely focus on the student, rather than what encourages students to drink. Fraternities, sororities, and athletics are huge sources of the students on campus who drink. There are many approaches colleges can take to decrease the problem, and many colleges are already getting a head start. It is also important to not ignore how often colleges indirectly encourage students to drink (20).

“From the moment freshmen set foot on campus, they are steeped in a culture that encourages them to drink, and drink heavily. At many schools, social life is still synonymous with alcohol-lubricated gatherings” (Cohen). Binge drinking is a huge aspect of the culture of college life; many college students binge drink to become socially accepted in a particular group. Binge drinking is not only

“80 percent of teen-agers have tried alcohol, and that alcohol was a contributing factor in the top three causes of death among teens: accidents, homicide and suicide” (Underage, CNN.com pg 3). Students may use drinking as a form of socializing, but is it really as good as it seems? The tradition of drinking has developed into a kind of “culture” fixed in every level of the college student environment. Customs handed down through generations of college drinkers reinforce students' expectation that alcohol is a necessary ingredient for social success. These perceptions of drinking are the going to ruin the lives of the students because it will lead to the development alcoholism. College students who drink a lot, while in a college

Alcohol abuse is a serious health problem when it comes to college students. "The average amount of binge drinkers on college campuses is 50% of men and 39% of women" (<a href="http://www.oregoncounseling.org/ArticlesPapers/">http://www.oregoncounseling.org/ArticlesPapers/</a>). There are various reasons why students drink and serious short and long term effects on the body and mind. Alcoholism is a serious problem for college students and there are many actions being taken to try to lessen the problem among colleges throughout the country.

High school is over and it is your first time away form home, what are you going to do? The typical college student wants to party! Of the people that were surveyed over half believed that the legal drinking age should be lowered. [O’Kane 1] The legal age to drink in the United States is now 21 years old; college freshman, sophomores, and some juniors are not of the legal age to drink. This causes a problem on many campuses; several students are experiencing their first time away from parental care in a setting sinonomus with drinking and clubbing. Some feel pressure from family and friends to receive excellent grades while attending school, sometimes the pressure is too much and going out and

Bruffee unsuccessfully grabbed my attention because his persuasive ways were weak and ineffective. I find his persuasiveness to be imprecise with no correlation between binge drinking and loneliness to which he refers as due to the lack of friends and being unfamiliar to school grounds led him to join a fraternity. For instance, his claims are supported based on personal experiences and personal observations such as students having difficulty of making a new group of friends, desperate to belong and academic background. Unlike Weschler, Bruffee does not use scientific studies, real examples and realistic solutions to adequately connect binge drinkers and introverts; therefore, Bruffee is less successful because he failed to support many of his claims, and his conclusion is incomplete.

Research has supported the observation that young people in America consume alcohol regularly; this prevalence of use increases rapidly during adolescence, as well as a few years afterward (Wagenaar and Wolfson 37). This has come to be a problem among college students. It has been shown through extensive quantitative and qualitative research that those under twenty-one years of age are able to obtain alcohol, which allows them to binge drink. Binge drinking holds many problems for college students: alcohol poisoning, DUIs, traffic accidents, and even fatalities.

Binge or excessive drinking is the most serious problem affecting social life, health, and education on college campuses today. Binge or excessive drinking by college students has become a social phenomena in which college students do not acknowledge the health risks that are involved with their excessive drinking habits. Furthermore college students do not know enough about alcohol in general and what exactly it does to the body or they do not pay attention to the information given to them. There needs to be a complete saturation on the campus and surrounding areas, including businesses and the media, expressing how excessive drinking is not attractive and not socially

Howland, J., Rohsenow, D. J., Greece, J. A., Littlefield, C. A., Almeida, A., Heeren, T., & ... Hermos, J. (2010). The effects of binge drinking on college students' next-day academic test-taking performance and mood state. Addiction, 105(4), 655-665. doi:10.1111/j.1360-0443.2009.02880.x

Alcohol use among college students has always been a popular subject among teachers, parents, researchers, and even students. The actual act of drinking alcohol is not necessarily the problem, whether legal or not. The main problem is the act of binge drinking of college students, of age or not. Drinking modest amounts of alcohol may have some consequences, but binge drinking has more negative consequences than normal modest drinking. There are many examples as to the consequences that binge drinking can cause to college student’s lives, but one of the main consequences that students face as a result of frequent drinking is poor academic final grades.

In the United States, over 80% of college students have at least one alcoholic drink over a two-week time period. Out of these college students, 40% are binge drinking on occasion. (Johnston, O’Malley, Bachman, & Schulenberg, 2009). Binge drinking among college students is due to the college environment and mostly effects freshmen in college. Now that young people are no longer living in their parents’ home and are not being supervised as much as they were before they now have the freedom to do whatever with whom ever. Which is where peer interaction comes into play. College is the time that young adults find new friends and discover themselves more. Peers provide the guidance and support needed to overcome the transition period. Peer pressure, is the direct influence on people by peers, or an individual who gets encouraged to follow their peers by changing their attitudes, values or behaviors to conform to those of the influencing group or individual. Peer pressure is a major factor in the development of risk-taking behaviors. Peers act as influential model by introducing, providing, or pressuring risky activities to other peers. In order to make these statistics go down colleges must and should provide resources and trainings that help college students successfully prevail over the pressures of peer pressure and social norms to drink.