It isn’t exactly breaking news that people drink in college. I don’t know about you but this fact is pretty clearly evident, and talking about it is less than exciting (and is something I leave to school blogs) but a study that was released recently might fly in the face of logic completely: on average, people who go to college are less likely to be alcoholics.
If you are as shocked by this as I am, then you aren’t alone. I’m sure thousands of college students are waking up today thinking to themselves “with as much drinking as I did last weekend I am going to be an alcoholic for sure some day.” Well it turns out they are wrong!
Apparently the majority of the over 18 million people who consider themselves alcoholic, the study suggests that most never even applied to college. And, for even further shock, 33 year olds who were surveyed were 7 times more likely to have an alcohol problem if they didn’t apply to college. I am not quite sure how it works, but I’m sure it has something to do with your liver telling you that after binge drinking for 4 years you should stop, and after 4 years of college your brain is responsible enough to listen.
Apparently this study also found a huge difference between low income people and everyone else, saying that people who lived in low income households saw an even larger difference in alcoholism rates in the study. Now, this has the potential to bring up a lot of unnecessary yelling about poor people, and could open the door for me to profile and stereotype every poor, uneducated person as a drunk and a failure, but I don’t feel like playing with carma today.
So the result of this study is pretty crazy, but suddenly the researchers started saying how they don’t think every person in America should go to college, because if there are no alcoholics left in the country, the profits from healthcare and the liquor industry would plummet. So now you are telling people not to go to college so they can support our economy in the future? Well if you say so! Sorry President Obama and your initiative to raise college graduation rates to the highest in the world by 2020, let’s shoot for highest alcoholism rate, it looks better for the economy.
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