College Beer Chugging Getting Worse
Beer pong and funneling have become synonymous with college. And the perception is not unfounded. New research shows heavy drinking among college kids is steadily on the rise.
Writing in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, experts say drinking-related deaths in college students, ages 18 to 24, have jumped from 1,440 a year in 1998 to 1,825 in 2005.
Between those two dates the number of students who binged on alcohol moved from 42% to 45%, and the proportion of kids admitting to driving drunk rose from 26% to 29%.
Also, researchers suspect 700,000 assaults and 100,000 sexual assaults on college students each year may be linked to intoxication. They insist the whole culture of drinking in college needs to change, urging society to take more responsibility for drinking among young people.
Now, not to long ago I was a college kid, but I always kept in mind it was an amazing opportunity, I treated it like it was sacred, and I still had lots of fun. I used my head! If you can't, the world could always use more fry machine operators.
Via HealthDay News.
10 Comments
Add Your Comment
ADVERTISING
New
- FROM DIET BLOG
- On-Off Fasting: Does It Work?
- 400 Calorie Fix
- 5 Factor World Diet
- Quick Giveaway: Powerhouse Weight Loss Game
- FORUM
- Low Carb Atkins Diet- Tips to Cut the Carbs.
- How Can I Gain a Healthy Weight and Keep it?
- How Do I Eat Healthy at University?
- Starving Myself and Exercising, But Not Losing an Ounce?
Categories
| Body Image Celebrities Diet Pills Diets Exercise |
Fast Food Funny Stuff Success Stories Teens and Kids Tips and Tools |
RSS Feed
Follow @DietBlog on Twitter
I did all of my partying & drinking back in high school and was done with the fad by the time I was college age. Yes, a sad, pathetic confession (the drinking part, not being "done with it").
ReplyI've been a good girl ever since.
The number of drinking-related deaths amongst college students really means nothing if you don't know what percentage of college students this represents. If the number of deaths has gone up about 27% (based on those numbers) but the number of college students has also gone up 27%, then there's been no change ...
ReplyTrue, but they go on to clearly show that the percentage who binge drink or drive drunk has increased.
What's really confusing is that the article that's linked to via the journal link says absolutely nothing about these statistics. The correct article from the same journal is here.
Ah, here is the relevant stat in the correct article:
"From 1998 to 2001 to 2005, the rate of unintentional
alcohol-related nontraffic injury deaths among 18- to 24-year-old college students increased from 3.9 to 4.0 to 4.9 per 100,000 college students, a significant 25.6% increase."
So the percentage did indeed go up, from .0039% of all college students dying to .0049%. (If I did those decimal places correctly - either way, it's an increase.)
ReplyYou've obviously not taken statistics in college; percentages don't change when the numbers of participants go up unless there's a measurable change.
ReplyThe percentages weren't given ... that was the problem. The article above gives hard numbers about the number of deaths, without relating that to the total college population.
ReplyHas this statistic gone up for the rest of the population as well? Or is this only a problem with college students?
Reply"They insist the whole culture of drinking in college needs to change..."
Changing the drinking culture in College? I think it'd be easier to teach pigs how to fly. Seriously. That is one HARD proposition.
What needs to happen is that drinking needs to be "NO BIG FRIGGIN DEAL"... specifically in the US where the legal age is 21. That's ridiculous. So you're technically an adult at 18, but too st*pid to make a decision on whether to drink alcohol or not?
Look at European countries where alcohol is part of the culture... I mean REALLY part of the culture. People don't seem to be taking it to such an extreme. It's when you pose limits and box people that you start to see 19 and 20 year old college kids drink their faces off since they can't do this anywhere else.
Maybe it's just me but if a kid is used to drinking say an occassional glass of wine since 16, and has been taught how to handle his alcohol... he'll do a much better job.
Forceful limitation isn't the answer, moderation is. Drinking shouldn't be "cool" or for "cool people". It should just BE! That's my 2 cents.
ReplyI agree completely. My parents have been giving me drinks of their alcohol since I was a young girl. I began to have a beer from time to time since I was 15 or so. I have never passed out from drinking, only been sick a couple of times, and never purposely went out to get "drunk" as many, many, students and people in general do. Shocking as it may seem, when alcohol is a part of life it is simply a part of life; used in moderation and with maturity.
ReplyI think we're looking at this the wrong way. We should look at this as an opportunity; we can start adding poisons to alcoholic beverages to weed out our gene pool a little :)
ReplyMy parents always let us have a drink socially with them on holidays or special occasions and I've grown up thinking alcohol was not really a big deal. If anything, I didn't really care to drink any more than one drink because it always made me warm and lightheaded. I never really drank in college and I went to one of the BIGGEST party schools in the country. Most of my friends that partied a lot did so because they thought it was some sort of really big deal that meant they were independent.
Reply