Why The Kids Just Can’t be Kids Anymore
When asking college students how often they go out, you expect the answer to be much higher than other demographics. Universities like Florida State University, Tulane, and Miami University have been given the “honorable” titles of being some of the top party schools in the country. Millennials spend With atmospheres like this you expect students to constantly be out and doing things. This is the assumption, but when polled, students actually show a decline in things like this. The question is why?
When students at Middle Tennessee State University took part in a survey conducted by freshmen in an English class, to understand the social atmosphere on campus, over 90% of the participants said the main reason they don’t or can’t go out is money. This is expected, with the high costs of tuition and minimum wage only allowing some to make $7.25 an hour. The real concern is, has it always been this way or are millennials just now drawing the short end of the stick?
The average costs of tuition has risen 260% since 1980 according to Business Insider, also not to mention the costs of all consumer items rising 120%. It is blatant to see that these are all factors that will go into the notion of staying in versus going out. Growing concerns also arise with the new tax plan that was put into affect Monday, December 4, 2017, which could spell serious issues for students, by possibly putting a tax increase on graduate students, and repealing some student loan tax credit, according to Time Magazine.
Another aspect to consider is the fact that while tuition is increasing, so is the curriculum. Reports have shown that as time passes, curriculum has increased for college entry. While this is something that affects mostly high school students, this directly goes into the likelihood of the student moving along to college.
Both graphs depict the rate of difficulty that a high school student now experiences, versus years prior. With more curriculum required to graduate and more students graduating above the standards, this opens up a whole new can of worms that students are now faced with and that is competing with others for these schools to notice them.
“Over the last 20 years, the admissions rates for some schools have been halved or quartered. [It makes] schools today’s parents knew as backups now red-hot and almost impossible to get into,”
Explained Lacey Crawford, author of the novel Early Decision: Based on a True Frenzy. With schools becoming more selective from the amount of students applying, one can only imagine the rigorous courses a high school freshmen now has to take to set themselves apart from the rest. To gain more insight, I spoke with a high school freshmen at Hume Fogg High School in downtown Nashville to shed light on some on his course load and how it has changed.
“I used to like school. I’d do most of my homework in a few minutes and understand the content, but now it’s totally different.” said Luke Wood. Luke went to Meigs Academic Magnet School which is ranked the number one middle school in the Nashville Davidson County area. “All of my teachers tell me if I don’t take accelerated courses, I might not get into the schools that I want to, or I’ll have to choose schools that are not so selective.” With courses such as Mandarin, Microeconomics, Statistics, and many more offered, these students feel if they don’t have a few of these under their belt by the time they graduate, the prospect of getting into a decent school is slim.
While the two factors mentioned prior may be daunting, there is another factor that may explain why college students are going out less; binge drinking. The idea that college students get inebriated more often than not, is simply not true anymore. Binge drinking in college students has dropped from 45% to 37 between 2005 and 2014 according to Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs. On the campus of Middle Tennessee, only 27.3% of participants said they had participated in binge drinking according to the American College Health Association’s Health Assessment. This is good news, and with programs such as the National Collegiate Alcohol Awareness Week which informs students the dangers of drinking and driving, and other programs like Mythbusters: Alcohol Edition and Rethinking Drinking: Straight Up With A Twist offered on Middle Tennessee campus, the percentage of students who participate in binge drinking or other abusive behaviors with alcohol can be thought to lower over time.
Not much research has been done on this subject matter. Is it the lack of data? The absence of participants willing to participate in a survey of this kind? Or the stigma that comes along with being a college student is that you “party now study later” and we’ve just let this title stick? Whatever the case is, students do report that they go out less. Whether it be for good or worse, it is important to devote time into this subject matter and determining other variables that may go into play when a college student decides they party the night away, or have a lonely night with Netflix in their dorm.
