Alcoholism

2 Pages 502 Words

Alcoholism is a terrible disease, which has the possibility of affecting one’s health, family or work. College students often times turn to alcohol to solve their problems as a release from mounting school pressure. But does drinking while attending school really affect a student’s behavior pattern and performance in school? Studies indicate that as many as 30% of youth engage in frequent drinking behaviors (Sullivan & Risler, 2002). Believe it or not, this happens to be a more than a quarter of our student population! Granted learning can be tedious at times, but this probably could be the last stop of acquiring raw knowledge before heading out into the real world. I have assembled a set of factors that might explain student’s alcohol abuse and how it affects their behaviors respectively. Too bad it could be as easy as telling them to just stop drinking.
A substantial amount of empirical research is available demonstrating a connection between alcohol consumption and impaired academic performance (Perkins, 2002). How surprising is this though? This whole statement reminds me of a chain reaction down the line. Play with fire and you die by fire. Drinking all night causes a student to lose interest in school. Their grades start to falter and laziness turns into major procrastination. A survey was taken from a pool of about 40,000 students stating that 22% had performed poorly on a test or project and 28% had missed a class due to alcohol use (Presley et al., 1996).

One of the effects of student drinking is the increase of risky sexual behavior. In a study relating alcohol and sexual behavior (Desiderato & Crawford), 59% of students surveyed responded saying alcohol consumption usually preceded a sexually activity. This is surprisingly scary since sexual situations can lead to altered lives down the road. People tend to become less careless which leads to either unwanted pregnancy or even worse by contracting...