Studying reduces alcohol abuse
College is often perceived as a risky environment for problem drinking, but seldom have people looked at the long-term consequences of attending college on substance-use patterns,” said Stephanie Lanza, research associate professor of health and human development.
What if everybody would go to college?
To investigate the effects of attending college on future substance-use patterns, Lanza and her colleagues asked two questions: “If all youth in the United States could go to college, what impact would that have on substance use behavior in adulthood?” and “Among kids who went to college, did college hurt them or protect them in terms of adult substance abuse?
The team examined more than a 1000 high-school seniors who participated in the National Longitudinal Youth Survey 1979. The survey assessed the participants’ college enrollment a year later, in 1980. In 1994, when the participants were approximately 33-years-old, they were asked about their alcohol, tobacco and drug use.
The researchers analyzed the data and came up with two subgroups: low-level users characterized by very low probabilities of binge drinking, cigarette use, marijuana use and crack/cocaine use, and heavy drinkers characterized by having an elevated probability of reporting binge drinking and being as likely to engage in occasional or daily smoking as not.
After identifying these subgroups, the team applied a statistical tool called causal inference.”One of the biggest problems in studies involving humans is the frequent inability to assign people to different treatment groups,” Lanza said. “For example, we can’t randomly assign certain individuals to attend college and others to not attend college. Causal inference is a way of dealing with the non-random nature of human studies. In this study, it allowed us to balance the data so that it mimicked what we would have seen had we randomly assigned high-school seniors to either go to college or not.”
College reduces problem drinking by factor 6
The researchers found that college enrollment may actually prevent adult substance abuse among youth who might not be expected to attend college because of factors such as low household income and low maternal education. Specifically, they found that adults would be more than six times more likely to engage in problem drinking at age 33 if they did not attend college, compared to if they did attend.
“Hypothetically, if we could send everyone in the United States to college, that would be protective overall and would significantly reduce problematic substance use in adulthood,” Lanza said. “But because it’s not the reality that everyone in the United States goes to college, we had to apply our statistical techniques to balance the data. After doing that, we found that college enrollment does not protect against problem drinking, nor does it place individuals at risk for future problem drinking.”
