Students don't need nannying by their universities - it's a shame they are drinking less

Welcome to Refresh – a series of comment pieces by young people, for young people,  to provide a free-market response to Britain's biggest issues 

Every year Freshers’ week photos of students make headlines. Drunken debauchery, binge drinking and general messiness are splashed out for the world to see. However, new reports show that more and more students each year are choosing not to engage in binge drinking, with some just giving up alcohol altogether. Is this the beginning of the end for wild student nights out?

Students are not being given the same opportunities to wildly drink alcohol that they may have done in the past. With student unions clamping down on drunken behaviour, students are abandoning binge drinking in their droves in favour of other forms of socialising.

With board-game cafés popping up in cities across the UK, and pub business in decline , broader drinking trends seem to have infiltrated the last bastion of binge drinking: the student night. This is a prime example of how university systems are limiting students. Surely it should be up to us, as grown adults, to manage and measure our own behaviour – even if it does occasionally mean a bit of a drunken mess?

According to an National Union of Students (NUS) survey, one-fifth of all students have given up drinking completely. This is a far cry from stereotypical images of students who go out every day of the week, rolling into lectures hungover and exhausted.

A number of universities, including Aberdeen, Bristol, and Chester, have now introduced alcohol-free halls. The University of St Andrews saw 400 applications for the 132 alcohol-free rooms they had available.

 This demonstrates that not only is there a decline in student drinking but, perhaps, a demand for its decline. With university tuition fees costing more than ever before, £9,250 a year for many students, some students just don’t believe that drinking is worth the risk any more. Students are more than ever focusing on degrees over drinks, jobs over jollies, and this trend doesn’t seem to be slowing down.

Society socials are the main culprit in many cases of student binge drinking, but fears over bans and fines means that these socials are not the same carefree jaunts like they used to be. In 2017, Cardiff University Students’ Union banned the rugby team for four weeks over poor behaviour. Sports societies are continually scrutinised for initiations, inappropriate social themes, and casual sexism. All of this is extremely important in ensuring that societies are held to account for their accounts, drunk and sober.

However, in some instances, excessive policing of societies has led to fewer socials and students feeling uncomfortable in ‘letting loose’ on a night out. Obviously, there is a line between what is fun and what is appropriate, but sometimes fears of being banned can take the fun away from what should be an innocent student night out. Student Union policing has even extended to controlling which alcohols students are allowed to drink. In 2015, Edinburgh university banned ‘strawpedos’, drinking a number of alcopops through a straw. Students started a petition  to reinstate this, but to no avail.

Swansea University has even defined binge drinking, with their guidelines saying that two large glasses of wine is considered binging for female students. If student unions truly cared about student drinking, they might take more proactive measures in ensuring that there are systems in place for keeping students safe after drinking, rather than banning drinks outright. After all, if a person wants to get drunk, they’re going to do it regardless of union policies, strawpedo or no strawpedo.

This is just one example of how some student unions are happy for the business of student drinking, but aren’t prepared for when this may go too far. In doing so, we students are being nannied in our approach to nights out.

This is something which may have ramifications further down the line, as university should be a time when students must learn their own limits – without excessive interference from university organisations. This leaves students with limited culpability and some without a chance to ensure they know their limits.

Obviously routine excessive drinking is not something that should be encouraged. However, the new trend of anything and everything being prescribed as dangerous and unhealthy is just another way in which the student experience is limited.

University should not able to prescribe student drinking habits, as it is the only time that student are truly able to understand their limits without, usually, serious consequences. After all, if you can’t make drunken mistakes as student, when can you make them?

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