Abstaining from Alcohol before College?
about the author
Jordan J. Frasier is a staff writer for NextGen Journal. He’s a senior at George Mason University studying political science and journalism. Jordan is a news editor for Connect2mason.com and is a network news intern in Washington D.C. Connect with him on twitter @jordanjfrasier and at jordanjfrasier.com.
From behind the bar, pledges ladle juice into red plastic cups and pass them out to waiting hands. The mix of fruit punch and vodka is the drink of choice on just about any Friday or Saturday night.
It’s those same juice-ladling pledges who brought most of the crowd to the house tonight. They’re not allowed to drink. Instead, they man the bar and wait for the phone to ring. The calls dispatch the pledges back to campus where they fetch carloads of undergrads that have heard about the party and tracked down the right phone number to get there.
Carman Hashimee attended her first fraternity party last fall during her first semester at George Mason University. The sophomore psychology major wasn’t new to college life after spending a year at community college, but she had never been immersed in the social culture of a residential campus.
Last week Outside the Classroom released a study claiming students are entering university life as teetotalers at a greater margin than they were as recently as 2006. The study found that 62 percent of incoming freshmen have abstained from alcohol consumption in the 30 days leading up to living on campus.
Hashimee was not a teetotaler when she came to Mason or even when she enrolled in community college. But even though she was no stranger to the occasional drink, the alcohol soaked social environment on a university campus was somewhat surprising.
“When everyone else is doing it,” she said. “You don’t want to be the one left out.”
During her junior year of high school, Hashimee and a friend were watching the movie “Superbad” in the friend’s basement. On a whim, the pair decided a couple of margaritas would make the film all that much better, so they mixed the cocktails, and Hashimee had her first drink.
Even though her parents had verbalized their hope that she would wait to drink until her 21st birthday, Hashimee said everyone else in high school had started drinking ahead of her.
“They can’t expect me to go to college and not drink,” she said.
Hashimee says she didn’t feel pressure to take a drink while in high school, but figured she might as well give it a try. That’s exactly the mindset Outside the Classroom says many students are shying away from. CEO Brandon Busteed says the trend of abstaining from alcohol that his organization uncovered is due in part to the down economy. Busteed said more students are taking their college prospects more seriously because of the expense involved.
That may be, but even for those students who get to campus having abstained from alcohol, many don’t continue the trend. It’s known as the “college effect”: a Newsweek article published in 2000 cited surveys which showed nearly half of all undergraduate students drink excessively. The article defined excessive drinking as five drinks for males or four drinks for females in a single sitting.
Many campuses provide educational initiatives for combating the amount of alcohol use among college students, especially among underage residents, but those initiatives are often overshadowed by the availability of alcohol.
Hashimee says even though she’s not yet of the legal drinking age, she could have access to alcohol almost whenever she’d like. She says college campuses are full of legal drinkers who have no problem supplying their younger peers with drinks, like the abundant frat party juice.
“At first you don’t taste the alcohol,” Sashimi says of the juice. “But after you’ve had a few, you start to taste it.”
Obviously the juice isn’t the most sophisticated of cocktails, but Hashimee said college students don’t care. She says students are concerned with the amount of alcohol, not the quality, and most people just buy alcohol to get drunk.
That seems to be the larger economic impact, Hashimee says. She’s noticed fellow students who might be strapped for cash and might not have the resources to go out and do many off-campus activities. But with $20, Hashimee says those students can go buy some beer and instantly have access to a social environment that costs less than dinner and a movie.
A recent article from the Christian Science Monitor says the economic downturn played into the decision of 6 out of 10 college freshmen in choosing where to go to school. That could translate into altered behavior, maybe even abstaining from alcohol.
