After reading an article on The Guardian website, I felt like I should post about something that's taken as common knowledge in 2012: students and their drinking habits.
The article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/mortarboard/2012/jan/18/drink-worse-than-fees?fb=native&CMP=FBCNETTXT9038 basically claimed that all, or the majority of students drink far more than they should, far more frequently than they should. Written by someone who had been a binge-drinking student, it was the perfect way to get adults to stereotype young people even more than they already do. Because young adults can't win. If they're not out mugging old ladies and starting riots than they're pissing away their degree at the pub every night, right? Wrong.
Young people are not given enough credit for what they do. Yes, some of them commit crimes and spend their entire life at university so goggle eyed that they don't even know their own name but it isn't a lot and it definitely isn't the majority. We've got more people at university studying for degrees than we ever have, but instead of being proud of our teenagers for making something of their lives rather than popping out babies before they're twenty and never having a job, we stereotype them as useless wastes of space that care more about having sex and partying than getting a good degree and it's not fair.
I live with eleven people, all studying different subjects at degree level, and although we do enjoy going to our local pub, our lives definitely don't revolve around it, and when it's exam time or we have deadlines for important essays, we hole ourselves up in our rooms and work! Alex, for example, stays at the library way into the night, and Patrick's even done all-nighters because he's been so desperate to finish his work. And this isn't the weird minority who happen to be workaholics and social recluses: this is the majority.
One of my house mates, Becky, is on the same course as me, and we regularly meet up to do our work together, to brainstorm ideas and help each other out with structuring essays etc. Over the Christmas holidays we actually scheduled "revision phone dates" where she would ring me up and we'd pool all our ideas we'd had about the books we're studying, and we wouldn't talk about our social lives until the revision was over with!
Of course students enjoy going out: going to nightclubs is common practise for teenagers and most people enjoy going to them every week or so. It definitely isn't every night: if it was, and people were doing terribly with their grades they'd be kicked out of uni for a start, and secondly, how could they even afford to go out so much?
The article criticised university societies for putting pressure on people to drink with their regular club crawls, but I don't see this as being particularly pressurising. Student societies are a great way for people to meet like-minded individuals on a weekly basis and do activities relating to whatever they're interested in. Yes, they do have socials at nightclubs every so often but I for one don't need to be off my face to have a good time! I go to nightclubs because I enjoy getting dressed up, seeing my friends and dancing to my favourite music. I never take more than twenty quid out with me, and once you've deducted taxi fares and entrance fees, that hardly leaves room for me to be throwing up and passing out in back alleys!
In addition to this, the key point that this article misses is that people are actually passionate about the subjects that they're studying. University isn't like college, where you'd be doing a handful of subjects that vaguely interested you, but that you couldn't really care less about long-term. The grade you get at the end of your course matters: it has a direct impact on your future career, finance and life, and university students are intelligent enough to understand this and not mess it up with too many drunken nights out. What's more, I actually enjoy my subject! I adore reading and analysing books and I love being able to indulge my creative side with poetry and script-writing. I don't need motivation to turn up to my lectures because the content actually interests me and after all, I'm paying, not just for the degree but for my house on campus that lets me get to my lectures in record time. It wouldn't be within my interests to not turn up or do the work. If I wanted to go to clubs every night of the week than I'd be better off dropping out and getting a job at a shop or something!
Personally, I think that adults should invest more time into being proud of the next-generation and doing something useful with their own lives instead of subscribing to The Daily Mail's bigoted mindset and sitting on their arses bitching and moaning about people who are younger, better looking and more intelligent than they are.
