Campus drinking culture can stand in the way of students realizing they have a problem.

By Anthony Bryant

Through all the noise of college — and there’s a lot of noise — somewhere down the line you’ll hear the phrase: “You can’t be an alcoholic until after you graduate.”   

You’ll hear it as a joke, maybe — something to break the ice and get a couple of people to laugh. After all, it’s just college, right? You’re supposed to drink. You’re supposed to party. You’re supposed to be an “alcoholic,” the thinking goes.  

Incoming students at the University of Minnesota are required to complete AlcoholEdu, an online course designed for students to get an understanding of how to handle drinking. So it’s no secret — students are expected to drink in college.

And that’s the issue. Because of that expectation, students are lured into an illusion. They see what’s happening in front of them, and they take it for what it is, without understanding the damage a phrase like this can cause.

“You’re expected to drink all the time so you just do it — it’s a social thing,” said student Cassie McGillick. “But when you graduate you have a family and kids. You have a career. You are an alcoholic if you drink then.”

Emily Leighton, another student, agreed.

“It’d be hard to be a college student and an alcoholic because I feel like you’d fail out of school,” Leighton said. “If you’re in school, you have your priorities in order. When you graduate you either have to get it together or you’re an alcoholic.”

A study conducted by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism in 2005 found that approximately 18 percent of U.S. college students suffered from alcohol use disorder compared to 15 percent of their peers who did not attend college, although that did not necessarily put them at greater risk of addiction, the study found.

Ultimately, the term “alcoholic” is important — for individuals who are susceptible to addiction.

In 12-step groups, such as Alcoholics Anonymous, that term has a particular meaning. It’s a disease, not an unwillingness to change or a lack of control. The joke phrase thrown around in college implies “it’s your choice when you’ll stop … you’ll figure it out when the time comes.”

But for those who have the disease, that is the complete opposite of the truth.

In college, some may not realize that means them. Where is the line? When does “a lot” become “too much?” Where does someone go when they already think they’re on top of the world? As David Reddish, a distinguished McKnight professor in the department of neuroscience at the university, pointed out: “There are a lot of high-functioning alcoholics.”

While some students might think they do OK drinking through school, alcohol use definitely has its negative consequences. A 2015 Boynton survey looked at high-risk drinkers, identified as those who consumed five or more drinks per sitting, versus low-risk drinkers at the university. The survey found that high-risk drinkers were about six times more likely to do badly on a test or project, five times more likely to get into a fight or argument and more than six-and-a-half times more likely to miss class compared to their low-risk counterparts.

Along with that, the Higher Education Center for Alcohol and Other Drug Prevention says that “about 25 percent of college students report academic problems caused by alcohol use, such as earning lower grades, doing poorly on exams or papers, missing class, and falling behind.”

But while some can’t mix alcohol and education, others believe they can thrive on it, which leads them down a dangerous, and often delusional, path.  

Ron, a student in his last year at Augsburg University, who didn’t want his last name used because he says he’s battling addiction problems, said he doesn’t know if he would have ever started drinking if he hadn’t gone to college. He drinks every night and now wonders how he can stop after graduating.

“It started by me drinking only for parties,” he said. “That’s something about college culture. You gotta be drunk to have a good time.”

And Ron goes to a college with support systems in place to help students who struggle with addiction. At the University of Minnesota, students are even more isolated if they find themselves struggling with dependence on alcohol use.

“I’m not super aware of what resources there are on this campus for people who are trying to recover from addiction, or if the university provides anything like that,” said Chris McNamara, a University of Minnesota transfer student who is a member of the Greek community.

“I think addiction on campus is a problem, and very often it goes unnoticed because of the mentality that you can’t truly be addicted to the substance you choose until after you graduate,” McNamara said. “The biggest change in dialogue needs to happen between peers and the understanding that even though college may be a crazy time to do all of these new things, it doesn’t mean you have to go through this whirlwind of a culture that is the binge mentality in college.”

Binge drinking is the act of excessive alcohol consumption over a period of two hours — four drinks for women, five for men. The main point here is to get drunk, and to get drunk quickly. However, there’s something surprising about that same “binge mentality.” It has actually gone down over the past two decades, said Dave Golden, director of public health and communications at Boynton Health. In 18- to 24-year-old students, high-risk drinking dropped from 42 percent in 2007 to 34 percent in 2015. Campus-wide, the rate dropped from 36 percent to 27 percent.

But still, there is a culture of alcohol use that’s pervasive in some parts of the university. Kaeli Domino, a university senior, agreed that many of her peers are in denial about the lifestyle they lead in college.

After battling alcohol addiction and subsequently getting treatment for mental health and substance abuse in the winter, she sees the folly of her friends believing they can snap their fingers and make all of their drinking problems go away — that it’s their choice when they’re going to stop.  

“People think that after graduation they’re going to settle down and calm down,” Domino said. “And I have seen that not happen for people. I’ve seen it get worse for people after graduation.”