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Trevor Wilt Malcolm Campbell English 1102 3/27/2014 Alcohol Consumption in College: Is it worth the price? Alcohol is a substance that is constantly used throughout our country. I grew up in a house where alcohol was in use and I saw the positive but mostly the negative effects of the substance. With all the negative effects that come with consuming alcohol, there are a lot of college students that drink alcohol. In fact, according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, 80 percent of college students have consumed alcohol while in college. I want to find the reasoning to why kids go out and party all the time when they know they have so much invested in getting a degree. But the main question that is going to be answered is , How does alcohol abuseuse affect the success of a college student? College is very expensive. It is so expensive that many people dont even attend college due to all of the money that has to be thrown towards their academics. No matter if the student is going to college in state or out of state, the tuition is still going to be expensive. But the crazy thing is, the tuition is not even all that you have to pay. There are books, parking passes, fraternities, sororities, meal plans, and the list goes on of the things that many dont consider while coming into college. According to the College Board, it will cost 850 to 1,000 dollars per year to take care of a students annual book expenses. Parking passes on campus are not very cheap and are a real hassle to pay for considering all the other expenses. Fraternities and sororities can get expensive and so can joining other clubs such as sport clubs or art clubs. Furnishing and buying things to go in a students room is not cheap and can vary in cost
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depending on where the student chooses to live. Also, a student is likely to get bored from the cafeteria food at school so they might want to put money on a student card and get fast food around campus. Traveling back home to see your friends or family can get costly when living out of state which will rack up over time. If a student lives near campus and drives back from their house to the campus every day, that can get expensive as well. With all this being said, if a student does not think about these circumstances before consuming alcohol, they can risk losing a lot of money that was spent on making sure that they would have a good education and a bright future. While students like to think of drinking alcohol as fun and just acting like a typical college student, they do not realize how much they are jeopardizing by drinking. Although some students do pay for their college without parental help, the parents who day pay put hard earned money into their children going to college and attempting to figure out what their calling is in life is sometimes wasted.. Many students do not have that thought in the back of their mind before taking that sip of alcohol. Having fun in college is essential to getting through the tough years of college but only to a certain extent. Missing classes, poorly written papers, and failing tests are just a few consequences of college students drinking. There are many different views when it comes to college students drinking alcohol. Many fraternities and sororities may argue that drinking on the weekend when there are no classes relieves stress and is a good time to drink. Many students do not take into consideration that alcohol can damage areas of the brain that are responsible for learning and memorizing. With this being saidSaying that, The Alcohol Cost Calculator Kansas University found thatstated that Alcohol is implicated in more than 40 percent of all college academic problems and in 28 percent of all college dropouts. Although it may seem that the shots of vod ka you just
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consumed will just affect you for the night and maybe the next morning. It has the ability to hinder the way you learn for the rest of your life if you choose to let it. After doing some research, I have found that drinking can affect many organs in your body such as your brain, heart, liver, pancreas, and the list continues. Although all of these organs are very important to your body, I wanted to focus on how drinking affects the brain, which helps you decide on everything an individual does. Alcohol can cause the neurotransmitters to slowly relay information to your body which can cause behavioral changes that can then lead to memory loss and depression. When people start to heavily consume alcohol, it can cause your brain cells to lose size and also cause your brain mass to shrink. This can cause all types of problems such as messing with your sleep, mood, motor coordination, and most importantly in college, the way you retain information. With heavy drinking, alcohol damages liver cells which then causes toxic substances to travel to your brain and can lead to potentially a fatal brain disorder called hepatic encephalopathy. While all this may seem boring, the brain is what we use to retain our information so we can pass the tests, do our homework late at nights, and get our degree. At first, coming to college can be a very stressful task for some because of all the people surrounding you that you dont know and the expectations that the teachers in college have for each student. As classes are beginning, you have sororities and fraternities trying to invite you to parties and events that will hopefully get you involved with the cool kids on campus. Then you have your parents who are pressuring you to become a doctor or something that you are not even passionate about. With all this pressure, some students are just looking for a way to fit in and be looked at as a cool kid. With the news and social media accounts pressuring you to drink because that is the only way to have fun in college, it is tough not to fall into that pressure..
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Many students tend to join groups that will allow them to fit in with the cool crowd but not for the right reasons. The student should want to join certain groups so they can have fun and get involved with new people, not to get wasted and just drown out the school work. With this being said, this can definitely affect the success of a students first year and many more years to come for the college student. Binge drinking is defined as having five or more drinks for men and four or more drinks for a women in a row which can lead to many forgettable nights. Binge drinking has a serious effect on a lot of people throughout the country but mostly, college students. In an article done by Kevin Sliman of Penn State University, he spoke with the Penn State professor of education and psychology, Jeff Hayes, about college binge drinking. According to Hayes, 700,000 college students are assaulted by a student who has been drinking and 100,000 college students are date raped every year. Hayes mentions that once a freshman comes to college with his or hers first glimpse of true freedom, they tend to binge drink. He believes that universities need to find alternative activities for students to do on weekends that will help them coup with their drinking problems. Hayes found in a study, which he collected data from more than 100 colleges, that 44 percent of students said that they have been a part of binge drinking. Hayes stated that Students who are binge drinking with great frequency tend to be far more suicidal than their peers who are binge drinking less frequently or not at all. Many students do not see their drinking habits as a problem which can lead to deaths and serious injuries that can have a permanent effect on them for the rest of their lives. With all the people that are at college parties and are drinking heavily, there are some who just drink socially and do it just to have fun with their friends. These type of drinkers are known as social drinkers. Social drinkers tend to drink with low risk and not as much as others. It
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is said that females who are considered social drinkers will have about 3 or less drinks per sitting where is male drinkers will have about around 4 or less drinks per day. With that being said, there are those who have a problem with drinking and may drink to excess which are known as problem drinkers. These consumers are the ones who get trashed at parties but let it be known that there is no exact correlation to these drinkers and alcoholics. Once drinking gets out of control and starts to become a bad habit, then this is a sign of someone being an alcoholic. It is good to be able to tell the difference between a social drinker and a problem drinker and really grasp the concept of what the difference between them is. Drinking in college is looked at as something that a lot of students do throughout their college career. In some cases, drinking alcohol on a Friday night when you dont have school the next day is looked at as acceptable to do. With that said, students can still jeopardize their academic career by doing dumb things on the weekend. According to Kansas University, 599,000 students are injured after they have consumed alcohol. 1,825 students die each year due to alcohol-related injuries. Although this doesnt directly affect your grades, it can in the long run when the injuries lead to lifelong effects. Related directly to academics, Kansas University states that 25 percent of students say that they have experienced some consequences after consuming alcohol such as falling behind, being late or missing classes, and getting low grades,. nNone of which will impress a potential boss, your parents, or yourself. Why do students in college tend to drink in excess in college? When students come to college, a majority of them have heard or watched in a movie or news what crazy things college students are up to. So when they finally get to college and are trying to get in the flow ofuse thto the college life, they feel like drinking is considered the norm. Little do they know, it is very unhealthy and can cause serious destructive behavior. Although there is not one cause of students
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drinking to excess, a lot of the reasons to why students take their first sip or continue to drink is due to peer pressure. Having some freedom away from the family is great and can help you grow and be independent, but making dumb decisions as you are drinking or after may send you right back to them and can take down your independence in a blink of an eye. When others around you are telling you to drink a beer as fast you as can since everyone else is doing it, it is tough for students not to fall into peer pressure and chug the beer. If you dont, you get looked at as uncool or not fun. And after that first one, people want to see you do it again and that is what leads to excess drinking. I am not saying that drinking is an awful thing, but if you are uncomfortable with doing it, why do it? Although students are easy to blame when it comes to them consuming the alcohol. I believe that there are some things that can be done to prevent the use and abuse of alcohol. Students who go to parties on or around campus are putting themselves in bad positions because a lot of those students tend to drive after they drink. According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, there are about 3,360,000 college students between the ages of 18 and 24 that will drive while having consumed alcohol before getting in the car. I think that if they put more security around campuses, they will be able to catch more partiersties and more drunk drivers to prevent any damage. As for on campus housing, I believe that the RAs (Resident Advisor) should have to take their jobs more seriously. For example, I conducted an interview with Michael Shaw, my Resident Advisor, and he said Some of the Resident Advisors are too lenient when it comes to parties and alcohol. He believed that we should tighten up the security for RAs because they are getting paid a lot and go through so much training to keep college students safe. He said Although we do bust students for drinking alcohol, we help them in the long run because that should help them make better decisions in the future.
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Alcohol is a serious matter throughout our nation and was not just a problem in the past, but is still a problem. Too many teens are coming into college with the mindset of Lets get wasted! As you can tell, the use of alcohol in college does affect the success of a college student. Although some may say that alcohol can create great nights, do those fun nights outweigh the long lasting effects it can have on your body or someone elses life?

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Works Cited "Alcohol and KU." Alcohol and College Students. University of Kansas, 2009. Web. 31 Mar 2014. National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. College Drinking, July 2013. Web. 31 Mar 2014. "Alcohol Use on Campus." Why Students Drink. University of Minnesota, 27 Nov 2013. Web. 1 Apr 2014. "College Drinking-Changing the Culture." Interactive Body Content. N.p.. Web. 1 Apr 2014. Sliman, Kevin. "Penn State News." Probing question: How serious is the binge drinking problem on college campuses?. Penn State University, 5 Sep 2013. Web. 1 Apr 2014. "College Drinking-Changing the Culture." High-Risk Drinking in College: What We Know and What We Need To Learn. N.p., 23 Sep 2005. Web. 1 Apr 2014. Benton, Sarah. "The High Functioning Alcoholic." Social Drinkers, Problem Drinkers and HighFunctioning Alcoholics. Sussex Directories, Inc. 28 Apr 2009. Web. 20 Apr 2014. Shaw, Michael. Personal Interview. 1 Apr 2014. Baca, Suzanna. "Time." The Twelve Hidden College Expenses. Time Inc., 16 Nov 2012. Web. 20 Apr 2014.
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http://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/CollegeFactSheet/CollegeFactSheet.pdf

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http://www2.ku.edu/~alcohol/statistics/

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http://www.cehd.umn.edu/fsos/projects/alcohol/whydrink.asp

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http://www.collegedrinkingprevention.gov/collegestudents/anatomy/body_nonflash.aspx

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http://news.psu.edu/story/286174/2013/09/05/research/probing-question-how-serious-bingedrinking-problem-college

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http://www.collegedrinkingprevention.gov/niaaacollegematerials/panel01/execsum_01.aspx

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