Drinking alcohol negatively affects students’ academic performance.

➾ Students with high truancy rates were far more likely than students with low truancy rates to be drinkers or to get drunk. 3

➾ Heavy drinkers and binge drinkers ages 12 to 17 were twice as likely to say their school work is poor than those who did not drink alcohol in the past month. 4

➾ High school students who use alcohol or other drugs frequently are up to five times
more likely than other students to drop out of school. 5

➾ Among eighth graders, students with higher grade point averages reported less
alcohol use in the past month. 6

➾ Students drinking alcohol during adolescence have a reduced ability to learn,
compared with those youth who do not drink until adulthood. 7

➾ In a national survey of over 55,000 undergraduate students from 132 two and
four-year colleges in the United States, 23.5 percent of students reported performing
poorly on a test or assignment, and 33.1 percent said they had missed a class
due to alcohol use in the previous 12 months.  8

➾ College students who were frequent binge drinkers were eight times more likely than non-binge drinkers to miss a class, fall behind in schoolwork, get hurt or injured, and damage property. 12

1 Brown SA, Tapert SF, Granholm E, et al. Neurocognitive functioning of adolescents: effects of protracted alcohol use. Alcohol Clin Exp Res 24(2):164-171, 2000.
2 Swartzwelder HS, Wilson WA, Tayyeb MI. Age-dependent inhibition of long-term potentiation by ethanol in immature versus mature hippocampus. Alcohol Clin
Exp Res 19(6):1480-1485, 1995.
3 O’Malley PM, Johnston LD, Bachman JG. Alcohol use among adolescents. Alcohol Res Health 22(2):85-93, 1998.
4 Greenblatt JC. Patterns of alcohol use among adolescents and associations with emotional and behavioral problems. Office of Applied Studies Working Paper.
Rockville, MD: Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 2000.
5 The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University. Malignant Neglect: Substance Abuse and America’s Schools. New York: Columbia
University, 2001.
6 O’Malley, et al. Alcohol use among adolescents.
7 Swartzwelder, et al. Age-dependent inhibition.
8 Core Institute. 2000 Statistics on Alcohol and Other Drug Use on American Campuses. Carbondale Il: Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, 2000.
9 Wechsler H, Dowdall G, Maenner G, et al. Changes in binge drinking and related problems among American college students between 1993 and 1997: Results of
the Harvard School of Public Health College Alcohol Study. J Am Coll Health, 47(9):57-68, 1998.

Children who are drinking alcohol by 7th grade are more likely to report academic problems, substance use, and delinquent behavior in both middle school and high school. By young adulthood, early alcohol use was associated with employment problems, other substance abuse, and criminal and other violent behavior.