Heavy drinking is one of the most significant predictors of sexual assault in college, according to the poll of 1,053 current and recent college students. Analysis of the results found that women who say they sometimes or often drink more than they should are twice as likely to be victims of completed, attempted or suspected sexual assaults as those who rarely or never drink. Several male victims also pointed to alcohol’s role in their assaults.
Long-time readers will know that I am angry about how colleges treat drinking. When my daughters were in college, I sent only two communications to school officials. Both of these were suggestions for taking a more pro-active approach to drinking. One suggestion was to tell admissions officers to try to admit more students with a lower propensity to drink, in order to change the culture at a small college. The other suggestion was to encourage arrest and prosecution of a repeat-offender drunken vandal.
The students are not treated as adults, in that they are not held accountable for the crimes that they commit when drunk, including vandalism and assault. On the other hand, they are not treated as children, in that the schools enforce no rules against drinking.
Sometimes I think that the main point of college is not to teach critical thinking. It is to teach that there is no such thing as individual responsibility or accountability. “Alcohol” is responsible for bad behavior. The person drinking the alcohol is not responsible. The administrator condoning the drinking is not responsible.
In a larger sense, students are taught mindless sociology, in which group identity is everything, and individual responsibility is nothing. Individual effort plays no role in affluence–it is all a matter of “privilege.” Individual shortcomings play no role in poverty–it is all a matter of oppression.
In fact, there is a lot of truth to sociological views of power and group status. However, to treat this as the only truth about human relationships is to go to far.
What is odd is that I do not know anyone who deep-down believes in the pure sociological story. That is, I do not know any parent who tells their children, “Everything is determined by your group identity. You are not responsible or accountable for anything you do in life.”
If the higher education industry were more entrepreneur-friendly, I would start a college for students who want a low-cost, high-quality education and not a party school. Right now, most colleges act as if this is not a large target market. My hypothesis is that such colleges are missing an opportunity.
How to handle alcohol is an acquired skill. Maybe being a bit older before acquiring it is good, but I have my doubts about that. My suspicion is that parents are doing the wrong thing in trying to keep their children ignorant of the effects of alcohol while raising them and then sending them off on their own to college at age 18.
Like Yancy Ward I agree that parents aren’t engaged in improving their children’s handling of alcohol. I tend to think though that it’s a problem of legislation – the drinking age strongly implies that parents do not need to be involved in the education of their children. Drinking before it’s legal is like any other highly regulated vice, it tends to go out of sight, where problems can multiply.
My suggestion: abolish the drinking age. Place the responsibility of alcohol consumption and use back with families, and demystify the effects of alcohol on human behaviour, reducing the likelihood that students won’t act like inept humans once they’re let off the legislative leash. Countries with drinking age legislation have materially higher levels of treatment for alcohol related problems than those without (after controlling for differences in income, alcohol taxation, etc.).
I a recent Planet Money they were talking to Andrew McAfee at MIT about humans being replaced by robots. The reporter says “if you are lucky, like Professor McAfee, you may still have a job.” Earlier in the report they said he got a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from MIT, then got an MBA, then got a PhD, then became a professor at MIT. What a lucky guy.
What qualities should we look for so we can fashion a demographic set with which to compare the college attending drinkers? Perhaps a set of the same age group of non college attending adults? Depending on what we’re trying to tease out the group should be drinkers (how to define that will be tough), teetotalers, or a random group. That is a start.
The reason I propose comparisons models is to hopefully lead to better questions about what it is about college that leads to heavy drinking.
Intuitively, I think of college as a subsidized privilege that happens to signal to employers that you are kinda sorta like them and can do what they do well enough to get by. None of this involves learning anything, that’s incidental to proving that you can function in a workplace. This doesn’t discount the ability of non-college educated people to work at degree requiring jobs, but acknowledgement of non college ability and selection authority may be beyond the risk appetite or authority of the person assigned with hiring people.
I think people act like they understand this. They go to college b/c they have to and b/c it is often subsidized up front by the government, parents, or scholarship they have a lot of free time on their hands they use to goof off and be “young wild and free”.
Speaking for myself and anecdotally with my friends in mind college is unlike the real world where I live now and invovles different incentive structures. I behaved differently in college then i do now b/c i had less to worry about for personal upkeep and classes were easy enough. Now, i don’t have that luxury.
Further, even if i had that luxury now, i am older, so my desires have changed.
When you say kids are taught mindless sociology, I would say that is implicit in the bargain. Pay up front and defer your debt so you can hang out with other young people. also, there are classes, go to enough so you can get the piece of paper for which you may not need the knowledge that you gleaned in class.
Those who do go to classes (or don’t need to, given no attendance requirement) and do well don’t necessarily signal that they are hardworking individuals that can function in a job that requires them to function in a workplace. They could be smart and lazy, which isn’t good for many jobs that require more routine production of work product than critical navel gazing.
If you’re smart enough or work hard enough (but likely need both) you can glide into an academic position and deal with a different set of workplace problems. If however, you are smart enough to do well in school, but don’t work hard and don’t get into/want academia, you may or may find that you don’t have the proper habits and behaviors for a job. Why? B/c school even if school is ostensibly about teaching you, it actually functions as a decent filter for your ability to handle particular workloads (see accounting, biochem, engineering). How you handle them is not something that is qualified on your diploma (just pass your tests).
This process isn’t interrupted by some people shirking class to drink, so the process continues.
“I would start a college for students who want a low-cost, high-quality education and not a party school.”
I’ve wondered if there is a market for this type of school. Perhaps organized on the old boarding school model with the entire day filled, including weekends, except for a few hours Sunday. Mandatory at desk study time each evening. Also, somewhat electronically isolated most of the time to facilitate scholastic discussions rather than diversions or the latest celeb.
The purpose of the residential college is to immerse into academic environment isolated from the concerns of the business world.
It is interesting to me that the prevalence of alcohol on campus seems consistent with the signaling model of higher education.
Yes I think more class hours would be good. Perhaps even all papers could be written in classes.
I think there are some schools practically like this- Full Sail, for example, with a very intense program for software developers, graphic artists and other people that want to go into the digital entertainment technology industry. They tend to turn out really good developers. Not much time to drink…
I disagree with the perspective on alcohol.
Drinking isn’t the problem; crime is the problem.
On campus, all criminals may be drinkers, but that doesn’t make all campus drinkers into criminals.
Don’t check Bayesian logic at the campus gate.
Many US university undergrad STEM programs are very demanding, competitive, stressful, and cover advanced material. The classes are not easy, it’s often a sink or swim, students are under huge pressure. Many kids are pushed out of the fancier classes, not by bad behavior, but by not staying on top of advanced material. Lots of these students are super human study machines and studying most of the day, night, and weekend, and engage in minimal leisure. Of course, there are misbehaved students as well, but they tend to be in the less serious programs and classes and schools. Maybe I’m just surrounded by workaholic super students and you guys are surrounded by the problem types, but I suspect this crowd is severely misreading the situation. I’ve never even heard of an engineering classmate being involved in vandalism or alcohol type problems.
Both are true. We had papers due 10 am Saturday.
I had to walk past the business majors on the quad playing volleyball.
They served the same purpose as the bell in front of the Navy Seals training camp.
Just ring that bell and the pain goes away.
Btw, I have been the engineering booster gadfly around these parts. But I also think it is an indictment of higher ed.
The one area that isn’t pure signaling they have to use traumatic stress to break your brain in order to remind it.
I think the root of these problems is a refusal to admit that there are differences between the sexes. For all of human history the answer here would be obvious: don’t let young woman get drunk with young men. In fact, don’t let young woman party with young men unchaperoned. If young men want to be drunk fools in their own dorm rooms, or in a bar, that is part of boys being boys. But woman are indeed the weaker sex, and suffer far more awful consequences from drunken hook-ups.
I also agree with the other commenters, that alcohol should be introduced in mixed aged environments. There is also an old principle, now forgotten, that some amount of vice is tolerated without punishment, but it is not allowed to brag about vice. Because if people are allowed to brag about vice, then young men will turn it into a competition about how much vodka can be drunk, how many notches can be rung up, etc.
I also think there is no reason for the government to be subsidizing four years of partying for young people of either sex. If a college education is truly valuable, it could be paid for via a work-study co-op system (which is how my uncle became an electrical engineer back in the 1960’s, without any student debt, without his parents paying anything). For 90% of jobs, a real high school education and then apprenticeship would be enough.
“If the higher education industry were more entrepreneur-friendly, I would start a college for students who want a low-cost, high-quality education and not a party school. Right now, most colleges act as if this is not a large target market. My hypothesis is that such colleges are missing an opportunity.”
College would not exist if it was up to the free market. The right answer for men would be apprenticeship. The right answer for women would encouraging early marriage to a man of means and character.
I think there many be an entrepreneurial opportunity for creating an apprenticeship network, or for creating a courtship network. It is something I hope to look into further at some point.
“College would not exist if it was up to the free market.”
Are you talking about subsidies or government-mandated certification?
“For 90% of jobs, a real high school education and then apprenticeship would be enough.”
Yet, a bachelor degree–almost anyone– commands a premium in the labor market. Why?
Thiago-
Colleges have a number of special privileges that are the result of government intervention:
1) Credentialing – they are the legal gatekeeper to professions like doctor, lawyer, teacher, architect, etc.
2) Signal laundering – since anti-discrimination laws and the Griggs v Power court case came into being, companies are walking a tightrope when trying to screen job candidates. Using tests can get them in trouble, using any performance based test will generally create “disparate impact” based on race, which could get them sued. But they are allowed to college degree as a screen. So that is what they do instead. The colleges screen for smarts and conscientiousness, and then the employer uses that signal.
3) Apprenticeship contracts were basically made illegal. That means a student needs more time to learn skills before starting a job, since a company has no incentive to train a person who can just leave at any time. Colleges get massive subsidies via their tax exempt status and direct funding. So it makes sense to use college as that prep place. It used to be high school would leave people more workplace ready, but high school curriculum
4) All these reinforce each other. Since the smarter and well-bred portion of the population will go to college to get the legal credential, even companies that don’t legally require a credential will recruit from colleges. The people who don’t go to college will often lack the smarts of conscientiousness to be good workers. So part of the college premium is just correlation, not because the college adds value.
I see your points. Thank you for the thoughtful reply.
A new book is addressed to college students and their parents. The title is ‘Your Future Job: Building a Career in the New Normal’. It doesn’t deal with alcohol, but it does ask if college is a good idea for every student. And then it offers advice to students who choose not to go to college. It also recommends that some students should Drop Out Now.
http://www.amazon.com/Your-Future-Job-Building-Career-ebook/dp/B00ZMCCMPC
I don’t doubt that alcohol is a big problem at colleges, but I don’t take at face value the business about “sexual assault,” a concept that has been rather expansively defined by “advocates” for a certain point of view. I am surprised that, unless I overlooked something, no one here questions the claim of there being a real “assault” problem on campuses (compared to where – inner city neighborhoods? rural backwaters?).
We don’t have to. That is already discounted here. In fact, that is,kind if the point at the start of the post where it says a big part of the alleged assault problem is inebriation related.
I looked at the post again, and I don’t see any reference to the “alleged assault problem.” The quote seemingly takes at face value the reports of “assaults.” I certainly hope that readers of this blog have some skepticism about the “assault” hysteria that has emerged in recent years. Which is not suggest approval of the existing binge drinking and hook-up culture.
One of my pet peeves is that the state colleges in a state have different entry standards. This increases that number of students who will not be able to go to university and still live with there parents. This costs more money and adds to “partying”. I live in Gainesville FL and my son was rejected by University of Florida (UF is located in Gainesville FL) and so went to University of Central Florida. This cost me and extra $40,000 in living expenses.
Drunken students fall off balconies a lot, too. I know a kid who went to a prestigious liberal arts college and fell off a balcony and got hurt real bad.
I know of a college kid who died falling off a balcony. A rabbi’s son. Very sad. It might have been drugs, not alcohol, though.