Getting Wasted: Why College Students Drink Too Much and Party So Hard

by Thomas Vander Ven

  Heavy-drinking practices on American campuses declined briefly during the Prohibition era (1917-1934) when, by some accounts, “college students remained fairly temperate at least until the mid 1920s.… While there were egregious exceptions, most colleges and universities were not scenes of riotous drinking.… Drinking in college during the prohibition years, then, apparently was not much different from drinking in the rest of the country—that is, it was confined to and condoned by a minority.”26 By the 1930s, a new, more serious social type emerged on the college scene. While drinking on campus increased after Prohibition was lifted, a politically active undergraduate population added a “quiet sophistication” to college culture. The panty raids and drunken brawls of the 1920s did not disappear, but made room for the serious students with tweed jackets who may have used alcohol but did not allow intoxication to define them.27 Although the hard-partying segment of the college population shrank a bit, the collegiate subculture was alive and well on American campuses throughout the 1940s and 1950s. College men at some of our nation’s most prestigious institutions routinely got plastered and ran amok on campus, leaving a trail of vandalism and vomit behind them. In his history of college fraternity men, The Company He Keeps, Nicholas Syrett describes the disorder generated by Duke University fraternity brothers in the 1950s and 1960s:

  A typical incident occurred on the night of March 10, 1954, when members of Beta Theta Pi assembled in front of their dormitory section and proceeded to have a series of water fights complete with yelling and catcalls. Around midnight, a member of Beta was apprehended in front of Sigma Alpha Epsilon’s section, where he had just defaced a statue by dousing it with paint; the Sigma Alpha Epsilon brothers “took the man into their section and shaved his head.” … Duke fraternities … smashed through windows. Beer kegs were hurled onto sinks. More windows were broken by more thrown bottles than anyone could have counted. Destruction was obviously fun for fraternity men. It also served to mark them as reckless, wild, disobedient, and drunk.28

  It was not until later in the 1960s that a turbulent social world was reflected in a subculture of idealistic and serious college students who eschewed aimless drunkenness for deep thinking and radical politics. According to one account, the 1960s “marked a low point for the collegiate subculture on American campuses; numerous fraternities and sororities shrank in size or closed down as some of their members, and many incoming students, joined the rebel subculture.”29 Alcohol, however, continued to be an important part of collegiate life for many students. Greek life continued to be vibrant and alcohol-soaked on many of America’s campuses. And a public backlash towards Greek drinking culture was already “in the air.” According to Patrick Johnson’s 1963 study of fraternity life, Fraternity Row, many social critics of the day held “antifraternity” sentiments that were largely related to alcohol consumption:

  Although many young men just out of high school come into a fraternity house drinking little or none at all, most of them are soon radically changed. The informal rule among fraternities seems to be “Drink, Brother, Drink, and Then Drink Some More.” The more the members drink, the better men they are, and the more apt they are to be accepted. It’s this pragmatic standard and atmosphere of the fraternity that allows, and almost demands, that members drink heavily. The members who try not to drink find out it just doesn’t work. All it takes is a few fraternity parties and they learn fast. And the fraternity members themselves aren’t the only ones to experience this personal deterioration of their values via the highly approved and accepted practice of excessive drinking.30

  Despite these social criticisms and falling memberships, Greek organizations survived the politically turbulent 1960s and continued to be a popular choice for American undergraduates. In fact, campus Greeks experienced unprecedented growth in the 1970s. American fraternity membership doubled from 100,000 to 200,000 between 1970 and 1980 and reached a nationwide membership of 400,000 by 1990.31 Sorority membership grew at an even greater rate during this period, with sororities initiating over 250,000 members by 1990. According to some accounts, university officials actually encouraged the growth of Greek life because Greeks were perceived as being easier to manage than the politically active rebels of the 1960s, who presented social-control problems for university administrators. The massive growth of fraternities and sororities in the 1970s and 1980s and the acceleration of the alcohol-drenched subculture can be attributed, in part, to the popularity of the college drunk-fest film Animal House.32 The 1978 film, starring legendary comedian John Belushi, lionized drunken misbehavior for a new generation of college students. Grossing over $140 million in the United States, Animal House “confirmed the validity of the collegiate life in the 1970s and helped reinvigorate it.”33 And as with the brothers of Animal House’s Delta Tau Chi, the typical college partier’s drink of choice was beer. Heavy beer consumption on campus was partly facilitated by the major brewing companies who, starting in the 1970s, hired student “campus reps” to set up booths and hand out free beers at sporting events and other social gatherings.34

  While excessive college drinking was and still is most associated with fraternity parties, the drinking culture was not limited to Greek organizations. Dormitory life and off-campus housing became highly collegiate in the 1970s and 1980s, especially in large public universities, because university administrators took a “hands off” approach, largely abandoning the in loco parentis management style that was used in earlier decades.35 Alcohol-soaked parties and sporting events became synonymous with college life, a fact that did not escape the radar of college officials and the parents of university drinkers. By the 1980s, worried parents and powerful activist groups aligned to protest the primacy of drinking on campus. Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) was one of the most effective voices calling for a reining in of excessive drinking. MADD and other groups called for lawmakers to raise the drinking age from eighteen to twenty-one, and by the mid-1980s, national leaders responded. In 1984, the United States Congress passed legislation that effectively elevated the drinking age to twenty-one. By 1987, every state in the union complied with the law, but the well-intentioned legislation had little effect. The laws—in part meant to reduce college drinking—did not curtail the excesses of the party culture. The Animal House rules of conduct continued to be a large part of university life through the 1980s and 1990s.36

  Today, the college drinking discussion reemerges every year when the Princeton Review’s annual “party school” list is published. Since 1992, the Princeton Review (a test preparation company) has surveyed over one hundred thousand students at over three hundred institutions of higher learning to determine the hardest college partiers in the nation. The Princeton Review’s most recent party-school list identified the following ten institutions as having well-established drinking scenes: (1) Penn State University, (2) the University of Florida, (3) the University of Mississippi, (4) the University of Georgia, (5) Ohio University, (6) West Virginia University, (7) the University of Texas, (8) the University of Wisconsin, (9) Florida State University, and (10) the University of California–Santa Barbara.37

  Although some students take great pride in attending one of the celebrated party schools, school administrators aren’t exactly psyched about it. Making the “list,” according to college officials, detracts from their educational mission and may create a false impression about what matters most on their respective campuses. Furthermore, critics of the “party school” survey argue that the Princeton Review’s methods are unscientific and that their published findings paint unfair and undeserved portraits of the institutions that make the list. On the other hand, Princeton Review spokespersons claim that when schools “make the list,” it can be a catalyst for change. To support this argument, they point to schools—like the University of Colorado and the University of Rhode Island—that enacted alcohol-policy reforms soon after being labeled as high-ranking party schools. Whatever the relative merits or flaws of the survey are, the annual party-school
list is yet another example of the inextricable relationship between drinking and college life in America.

  Heavy-Drinking Research: The Emergence of the College Alcohol Study

  Fueled by activist campaigns and some high-profile drinking-related deaths on American campuses, social anxieties about college drinking reached a zenith in the early 1990s. Public concerns about college drinking received a jolt of scholarly credibility with the inception of the Harvard School of Public Health College Alcohol Study (CAS). Engineered by Dr. Henry Wechsler—once referred to as the “father of all drinking studies”—the CAS began collecting data on college drinking in 1993. Wechsler and his associates first sounded the college binge-drinking alarm with a 1994 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The study, based on a nationally representative sample of over fourteen thousand undergraduates at 140 four-year colleges, reported that heavy drinking was widespread among university students. Wechsler’s data showed that over 44 percent of his respondents qualified as binge drinkers and that one-fifth of those surveyed could be characterized as frequent binge drinkers.38 Later CAS publications showed that this high level of imbibing stayed constant throughout the 1990s and that binge drinking among college students remained at 44 percent as recently as 2001.39

  To be sure, Wechsler and his associates have led the way for college alcohol researchers. Their careful and systematic survey research has resulted in a large body of knowledge about the distribution of college binge drinking. Thanks to the College Alcohol Study we know that binge drinking is most common among whites (50 percent of white students are bingers vs. 34 percent of Hispanic students and 22 percent of African American students), males (49 percent vs. 41 percent of females), athletes, and fraternity and sorority members (though non-Greeks have been closing the gap).40 According to College Alcohol Survey researchers, the typical college drinker is who we think he is:

  The results partly confirm that the stereotype of the prototypical college binge drinker is grounded in reality. As many college personnel already suspect, being male, being White, having parents who were college educated, majoring in business, being a resident of a fraternity, engaging in risky behaviors, being involved in athletics, indulging in binge drinking as high school seniors, and, most importantly, viewing parties as very important are all associated with binge drinking. It is thus not surprising that college policies and programs intended to curb binge drinking appear to have brought about few changes.41

  We know who the bingers are, where they live, and what negative effects hard drinkers experience. It is the negative consequences of drinking that are most dramatically featured in Wechsler’s work. Just read the title of Wechsler and Wuethrich’s 2002 book, Dying to Drink: Confronting Binge Drinking on College Campuses, and you know where the authors are coming from. Though alcohol-induced fatalities most certainly do occur, relatively few college drinkers literally drink themselves to death.42 But if we can look past the foreboding title of Dying to Drink, it is clear that Wechsler’s work represents a very comprehensive catalogue of the dangers associated with patterned intoxication. To briefly summarize CAS findings, we know that bingers are more likely than nonbingers to face a host of problems, including educational difficulties, psychosocial problems, involvement in antisocial behaviors, risk-taking tendencies (such as drunk driving), injuries, and, yes, death.43 This is all very illuminating. It is important to know how many “problem” drinkers there are and who they are, and what problems their drunkenness may lead to. That said, the CAS survey seems to ignore or obscure the life, the dynamic interactionism, and the fun that exist in the college drinking experience by divorcing it from its social context. In order to better understand college drinking as a social phenomenon, a multimethodological sociological approach is needed, which brings us to our current study.

  A Sociological Approach to College Drinking Practices

  The existing body of research findings on college drinking was collected largely by way of surveys. Generally, surveys ask college students to report basic demographic data (e.g., age, sex, race, social class, and academic status), their personal histories of alcohol use, their involvement in activities at school, and the consequences of their alcohol consumption. The answers to these questions have taught us more than a little about individual experiences with school and alcohol but next to nothing about the collective experiences of students drinking together. Furthermore, the empirical story that has been told about college drinking thus far is a story of pathology. That is, researchers have focused almost exclusively on the harms and tragedies related to college alcohol use and abuse and have given almost no attention to the perceived social benefits and individual pleasures that students feel they are experiencing in the college drinking scene. If we are to understand why college drinkers persist in such a high-risk activity, even after experiencing significant alcohol-related troubles, we must explore the allure, joy, collective celebrations, and bonding rituals associated with heavy drinking too. The skewed focus on drinking as pathology has a long history. Over sixty years ago, prominent sociologist Selden Bacon called for a systematic sociological approach to studying alcohol use that would treat drinking not just as a harmful or abnormal practice but as a constellation of rituals and activities that is deeply embedded in social life. According to Bacon,

  To approach this subject with a predetermined scorn or animus, an approach not unknown in the field, could only lead to meager results and to an underestimation of the forces which are at work. That there are great rewards for drinking in our society can hardly be denied; being a genial and lavish host, being a connoisseur of wines and whiskies, being able to “hold your liquor,” are obviously rewarding states of affairs. Drinking can lead to an easing of possibly tense relationships between casual acquaintances as well as between parties to business or professional agreements. Drinking is closely associated with many pleasant occasions and situations and, in addition to any reward it may hold itself, is reinforced as a source of pleasure because of this association.44

  Written in 1943, Bacon’s observation that “there is a real scarcity of sociologically relevant”45 information on drinking in society could easily be applied to the contemporary state of college drinking research. Thus, to better capture the social complexities of college drinking practices, the current study uses a multimethodological, sociological approach.

  When I was constructing the research design for this study, my first research decision was to determine which college students and institutions to study. When discussing the college drinker, most people might conjure images of young, middle-class men and women living at traditional, four-year, public institutions. This image, however, does not perfectly capture the American university population or the full range of university experiences. The college student population is not some monolithic, homogenous group. On the contrary, the university population has become increasingly diverse over the years. The female student population, for example, has increased by 29 percent since 1997. Similarly, the presence of minority students has been increasing in recent decades. Since 1976, minority group enrollment has increased from 15 percent to 32 percent in 2007. Most of this transformation can be attributed to increasing numbers of Hispanic and Asian or Pacific Islander university students. And the percentage of African American students on our nation’s campuses grew from 9 percent to 13 percent between 1976 and 2007. Furthermore, not all college experiences are the same. Of the 15.6 million men and women enrolled in college in 2007, 6.6 million were enrolled at two-year institutions (e.g., junior colleges or community colleges) and nine million attended four-year schools. Of those who attended four-year schools, 5.8 million were enrolled at public institutions, while 3.2 million attended private schools.46 In short, any reference to the typical college student could be misleading since the college student population is not entirely homogenous and because not all institutions are alike.

  Given the time-intensive and qualitative nature of the current study, however, it wa
s impractical to attempt to draw a nationally representative sample. Thus, the current sample is a unique one. The sample is comprised of undergraduates at three four-year American universities.47 The three sites include a large public university in the American Midwest, a public university with a large commuter base in the American Southeast, and a small liberal arts college in the north central region of the United States. In recognition of the diversity of college experiences, the three sites were selected because they represent different kinds of institutions with potentially different drinking practices and attitudes towards alcohol use.

  The bulk of the data presented in this book was collected via an open-ended, qualitative survey. Respondents were asked to complete a questionnaire that invited them to write a true account of the last time they drank to intoxication.48 Students were asked to report, in as much detail as possible, why they decided to drink on this particular occasion, who they were with during their drinking episode, what it “felt like” to drink (e.g., “Was it fun?” “What were the rewards of intoxication?”), what specific events transpired during the drinking episode, and whether or not anything “went wrong” during the episode. This method resulted in 469 drinking stories. The drinking stories are a gold mine of data. They are, at times, fascinating and funny and, in other instances, heartbreaking. While some respondents spun lively tales of their drunken exploits, others were less dynamic. Some of the stories, in fact, were actually pretty uninteresting (as previously noted, college drinking is not always a Shit Show). The drinking stories were complemented by twenty-five intensive interviews with university undergraduates and over one hundred hours of field research in bars, at house parties, and at student festivals. I collected data wherever college students gathered to drink and whenever (morning, day, or night) they put their intoxication or the effects of their intoxication on display. Finding willing respondents was not difficult. As it turned out, students love to talk about drinking and all the rituals, causes, and consequences that surround it. A deeper, more detailed discussion of the methods of data collection and analysis can be found in the methodological appendix.