College-going and Trajectories of Drinking from Adolescence into Adulthood

Abstract

To explore an exception to the association between educational attainment and health, this study unpacked variability in the drinking of U.S. college students by applying life course concepts to analyses of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). Growth curve models showed that youth who graduated from four-year colleges before turning 25 without later reentering higher education had the highest peaks in drinking after adolescence and the shallowest declines into their 30s. Deviations from this pathway in terms of type, timing, and order of college transitions flattened out drinking trajectories from adolescence into adulthood. Expectations that more alignment between precollege and college social contexts (defined by family backgrounds, high school academic performance, and peer norms) would predict the most problematic drinking trajectories among young four-year college-goers were not supported. Instead, youth who appeared headed for the early four-year college pathway but did not make it there had problematic drinking trajectories.