By Living Room Correspondent Bernie
Not so long ago, the period of a young adult's life between the ages of about 18 and 21 were seen as something of a rite of passage, where they would leave home to go to university, and enjoy everything that university life offered, way beyond simply just getting a degree. Indeed, the idea that students were at university simply to get a degree would have been considered ludicrous. Parties were the order of the day, and from the mid 1980s onwards Thursday night in particular become known as "student night" in many towns and cities across the UK.
However, an article in The Guardian last month throws some doubt on that commonly-held belief as still being true. The article states that over a third, 34% in fact, of students aged between 16 and 24 now class themselves as being teetotal (almost double the 2005 figure of 18%, according to a report from University College London), a fact which took many of us at The Living Room Cardiff by surprise.
The reasons for this increase in the number of young adults abstaining is a little less clear, however. A rise in the number of students who don't drink for religious or ethnic reasons is one possible explanation, but doesn't account in itself for such a huge rise. There are also some suggestions that the students of today, themselves the children of people who attended university in the hedonistic days of the 1980s and 1990s, have seen what alcohol has done to their parents and decided on a cleaner way of living as the new design for life. The proliferation of affordable gyms on the high street, clean and welcoming as against the backstreet drabness my own generation associated with gyms in the 1980s, has also empowered many of today's students and young adults to take a keener interest in their health, including either cutting down on their alcohol consumption, or stopping altogether. Some interesting statistics on alcohol use and misuse amongst young adults can be found in a report published by the Alcohol Education Trust. The figures, for 2017, show a surprising number of young people between 16 and 24 (over 80%) do not class themselves as binge drinkers, a significant drop from ten years previously.
Perhaps equally remarkable is the rise of alcohol free student accomodation and halls of residence on university campuses. Many universities now offer teetotal accomodation to their students. St. Andrews University in Scotland was the first to do so, in 2015, and many around the country, including Swansea, Cardiff, Bristol and Manchester, now following suit. With the continuing rise in students who are teetotal, the number can only be set to rise.
An article in The Independent in September 2018 highlighted that even at those universities that don't offer teetotal accommodation, there are events which are alcohol-free.
The rise in tuition fees, saddling many students with huge levels of debt before they have even graduated, is just one of the reasons that many students are now eschewing drinking. The focus on getting a good grade to take into the employment market is also powerful driver, and combined with ever-increasing knowledge of the dangers of alcohol misuse, it seems likely that the number of students who are teetotal, and the number of universities who offer teetotal accommodation, can only continue to rise.