At the start of this week we began
a new unit on underage drinking and hazing at colleges. While the short videos
that were shown throughout the clip, some more horrific then others, they all
showed how college students drinking underage makes poor decisions. In this
video they focus on one Colorado Boulder student who was found dead after
hazing from his fraternity brothers. This student died from an over consumption
of alcohol. Colleges try to prevent these cases from reoccurring, but with an
entering freshman class looking forward to the “college experience,” it is
harder to crack down on underage drinking. Currently colleges have a three-strike
policy, if you are caught three times then there is a substantial penalty. A
policy more colleges should try would be to create mandatory educational
classes, along with the fine, in order to punish these young adults breaking
the law. Educating these college students should cause college students to be
more responsible when consuming alcohol. College students will pay a fine
either way, but by adding the educational course may cause these over drinking
problems to decrease. This brings up another point. Should classes be mandatory
for freshman in college on the dangers of alcohol, and also over consumption of
alcohol? These way students who are not caught will still know the dangers and
be informed on what may happen to them if they over consume on alcohol. On one
last note, something I was very surprised by was how the University of Colorado
Boulder handled the death of one of their students. The University did not call
the parents of the dead students parents, instead the parent’s found out from
the Dallas police four hours after the death of their son. This is an
unacceptable amount of time, especially when dealing with a death of one of
their students. The university should be contacting the parents within an hour.
If these changes were to take place, I believe we would start to see a change
in how much some students drink.
