Drug and Alcohol Abuse In College

  A possible topic I want to write my essay on is drug and alcohol abuse that college students may experience. I want to explore how this affects students in academic performance, extracurricular activities, and even their social lives. I would also like to research when and how alcohol and drug use is most likely to begin in college students. Many college students report being apart of the drug and alcohol culture in college, including binge drinking and frequent drug usage. I think this is an important topic to explore because it can heavily affect a student's performance in college, as well as have a lasting effect on their futures. 

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  1. Michael GoellerFebruary 1, 2021 at 8:23 PM

    This is a very viable topic. Multiple students have written on this with success over the years, and I will share some of their blogs with you (though you can find most of them easily enough by scanning down the right hand column of our blog). There are lots of ways to approach the topic, but I always suggest a historical analysis because I know from my own observation that the biggest change in drinking on campus followed the rise in the drinking age from 18 to 21 in the early 1980s (under Ronald Reagan -- in league with Mothers Against Drunk Driving). Though it was intended to reduce drinking on campus, and its many dangers, the shift in the drinking age actually led to a huge increase in drinking and helped create the crazy binge drinking party culture we have today -- and eventually gave birth to what Armstrong and Hamilton call the Party Pathway once the colleges gave up on strictly enforcing drinking rules, as they had to do under Reagan. Though I don't think there is any chance of going back to an 18-year-old drinking age, I think no one has really told the story of how drinking on campus changed during that critical time, which was, ironically, also the when the shift toward neoliberalism and privatization began. Melinda Cooper's history is actually quite useful for reflecting on how Reagan's moral agenda (of making college students pay for their educations while taking away their liquor) really ruined things in many ways -- in much the same way that Prohibition did in the 1920s.

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