With college drinking at record levels, many schools are making students take online courses about the dangers of drink. Others have increased penalties for alcohol possession and public inebriation, while still others have canceled besotted campus traditions like “spring fling.”
My own solution is inspired by what an undergrad told me a few years ago during a discussion in my office, after volunteering that she didn’t drink alcohol. “Between the bar-hopping and the hangovers, it takes up too much time,” she told me. “I need to study.”
But at most of our colleges today, students can drink — some of them quite heavily — and still succeed academically. That’s because we don’t require them to study very much.
And it’s getting worse. In 1961, the average full-time college student spent 25 hours a week studying; by 2003, it was down to 13 hours a week. Two-thirds of students in 1961 reported studying 20 or more hours per week; today, only one-fifth do.
We don’t ask them to. In a typical semester, half of our college students don’t take a single class that demands 20 or more pages of writing. A third don’t take a class requiring 40 or more pages of reading.
Yet their grades keep getting better. In 1960, 15 percent of all college grades were A’s; by 2008, it had skyrocketed to 43 percent.
You do the math: Lower workloads plus higher grades equals a lot more free time. And a lot of college students use that time to drink, or to recover from the same.
Let’s be clear: College students have always drunk copious amounts of alcohol. In the early 1800s, fraternities boasted about the “manliness” of members who could “hold their liquor.” A century later, drink had become a ubiquitous social lubricant for both sexes.
“A dance . . . can hardly be called a success nowadays unless most of the boys get ‘high,’ ” Duke University’s student newspaper observed in 1924, “not to mention the occasional girl who cannot be outdone by her masculine companions.”
That was during Prohibition, of course, so drink was a way to defy legal authorities. It was also a way to thumb your nose at academics, and everything they implied.
One observer wrote in 1905 of “a secret disdain for high scholarship and a feeling that just ‘getting by’ on examination and final term standings is good enough.” He went on to quote a typical student: “Scholarship isn’t very important — good fellowship and school spirit count for a lot more.”
Fast-forward to today’s college students, who routinely tell pollsters that social skills and networking are more important to them than academics. The big difference is that they are succeeding in school — not simply “getting by” — while doing even less schoolwork. The Gentleman’s C of a century ago has become the Easy A.
Meanwhile, colleges are devoting ever-more resources to improving kids’ social experience. New gyms, dorms and student centers sprout like modern-day cathedrals across our campuses, all sending the same message: Have lots of fun.
Should we be surprised that students drink lots of alcohol, too? The only way to depress that would be to require more work and less play, but that’s not in the cards right now. And that might be the most depressing thing of all.
Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University. He is the author of “Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory.”