Every Friday, Saturday and Sunday, Facebook is filled with endless status updates, wall posts, and whatever else that often reads something like this: “What the hell happened last night?” Or, “Had a little too much fun last night,” all of them clearly referring to excessive drinking.
Recently, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have suggested that students who post such Facebook updates may be at a “clinical risk of having a drinking problem,” according to an ABC News article. Well, being a college student myself, I beg to differ.
Dr. Megan Moreno and other researchers studied more than 200 Facebook profile pages of college students ages 18 to 20-years-old from the University of Wisconsin and the University of Washington. Participants in the study may or may not have posted some sort of update about alcohol, but regardless, each had to take the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test, which is used to determine potential problems with alcohol.
The study found that 58 percent of the students met the definition for “at-risk,” and 38 percent merely posted about their drinking without being “at risk.” The study also noted, however, that about 23 percent of the participants who did not mention alcohol on their Facebook page were still considered “at-risk.”
I think we can boil the question down to this: What is the norm in terms of college student alcohol consumption?
My sophomore and junior years were my “excessive alcohol consumption” years, but most college students start drinking rather heavily their freshman year and continue until about their junior year. Take note that the study examined students of only these age groups, freshman, sophomore and juniors.
Moreover, these studies ask how many days you drink a week, and how many drinks you have on average everyday. College students can drink a lot, surprisingly. And they drink a lot about two to four days a week, Thursday, Friday and Saturday. I am not in away condoning this behavior; of course it’s not going to be good for our health now or in the long run, but we are college students in need of some social lubricant. And this is especially the case for freshman and sophomores.
Also, our junior and senior years are when school becomes a little bit more demanding, meaning we have less leeway to fool around outside of school. People in the 18 to 20-year-old age groups don’t exactly face this problem yet, for the most part. This means they can drink a little more without feeling the consequences as much as you would if you were a junior or senior in college.
When we should worry is when the drinking starts to veer us away from our path as a student. We are in college, first and foremost, to study and earn our degree. After that, we are here — essentially — to learn how to make our own, wise decisions like the adults we are. This, however, cannot be learned right off the bat — at least for most people. It takes some irresponsibility, some wrong decisions and some regrets to finally find exactly what path we should be on right now.
If your priorities are still straight and your degree is coming along, but you enjoy some drinks over the weekend, I wouldn’t consider it a “drinking problem.” I would call it the average college student’s life, which is always full of experimentation. That being said, cheers to all my healthy drinkers.
Sonia Guillen is a senior journalism major and opinions editor for the Daily 49er.
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