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Comment by roncesvalles | Hacker News Reader

College students have basically stopped drinking. I had a recent Berkeley college grad tell me no one drinks at Berkeley anymore because they're afraid it will shrink their brain. Things are just so competitive that having fun in college is a complete afterthought. It's constantly chasing grades, internships, side projects, networking, job interviews etc.

Alcohol is going the way of cigarettes.

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Not in the UK from what I can see, there's stories about it in the news but try actually going to hackney on a saturday - it's full of 22 year olds drinking (and also often smashing loads of bag...).

Maybe that's not a representative sample but young people still want to socialise and at that age you can get away with it so why not.

Having said that, the UK is absolutely a nation of pissheads, the US has always has that puritanical streak

There's a pretty strong observation bias when it comes to college drinking. The social gatherings of basically anybody who does drink ends up involving drinking, which pushes out the non-drinkers, until you end up with two completely distinct social circles. To add to the effect, alcohol is wildly useful in socializing with strangers, so the non-drinkers know far fewer people.

Thus, if you ask someone who does drink they'll probably say "everybody drinks, except for a few people", and if you ask someone who doesn't, they'll assume most people don't, except for the minority of people getting loudly drunk in public. That was true even where I was at school, where polling found that 70% of the student body was drinking on the weekends.

BS. They just replaced alcohol with weed and a bit of amphetamines.

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