Trying to avoid schools with heavy pot use

College Life
21

We have no intention of looking at bible colleges or military academies. I simply asked if parents here knew of schools we should PARTICULARLY avoid because of VERY HIGH drug use. My son is going to do whatever he chooses at school – I know this – but selecting a school where drug culture isn’t overly prevalent is prudent.

Kids in our area (a very progressive area) who use marijuana go to Reed, Lewis and Clark, Vermont, schools in Colorado and California, etc. I was asking about other schools that appear on lists, to find out whether there is any accuracy.

22

Also the Quaker schools (Grinell, Earlham, Guilford) are known around here as weed-friendly.

23

I just asked my son about the pot use at Auburn - he hasn’t seen any, although he knows it’s there and has occassionaly smelled it in his apartment complex. This may be more of a question about who he hangs with - Engineering students need to be alert and awake for the long study/research hours so not so sure they’d give up time to be drunk or high. Not sure if this is typical but just a thought.

24

I don’t think what you’re looking for exists. Pot is ubiquitous on college campuses. If you just want to avoid schools where people party so much they don’t come to class, 4 and 6 year graduation rates are a good place to start.

25

I think it is probably a question of students choosing their poison. Schools like Wesleyan, Oberlin, Grinnell, Reed, Swarthmore, Carleton Colorado College have long been seen as schools where students were more likely to enjoy a toke than get blindingly drunk.

26

Send him to BYU. Case closed.<<<<<<<

in 2016 a BYU student was arrested for having a nice little meth lab. Utah has a big problem with the current trend of drug addiction. Pot might be the least of anyone’s worries. RX use is AOK with the theocracy.

27

A generalization no doubt, but I’d say that colleges with more liberal student bodies will be more weed heavy and more moderate/conservative colleges will have a drinking culture. Pick your poison.

28

I don’t think of Carleton or Swat as being heavy pot smoking schools. It occurs there, but I don’t think it is integral to the culture.

29

Totally agree with doschicos, above. My son went to two music festivals in the Spring. One was very liberal - lots of weed and drugs - and the other was “patriotic” 'Merica, and the “drug of choice” was alcohol. I know we’re talking colleges and not music festivals, but it’s probably a good variable to look at for colleges too. And I’ll follow this thread because my kid doesn’t like pot, and I would like him to go to a pot school, if you get my drift. :smiley:

30

IMO, there are very few schools where weed is “integral to the culture” but weed definitely exists - and not just among a small minority - at Swat, Carleton, and, to a school mentioned upthread, Vassar. However, they are academically strong and intellectual schools. The usage doesn’t get in the way of students doing very well both in and out of the classroom.

31

As a NC native, I’ll echo the other posters that mentioned UNC Asheville. At my high school, UNCA was known to be the stoner school.

32

@Sybylla One anecdote doesn’t say anything about the culture at large. Have you visited BYU? Spoken with current students? Spent any amount of time on campus? One huge drug debacle doesn’t change the overwhelmingly sober culture at BYU that you likely won’t find anywhere else.

33 
       Le sigh. BYU doesn't need people shilling for the school because it isn't full of potheads, what a ridiculous premise. It is dead cheap too LOL.
34

@intparent, I don’t think it is “integral to the culture” at any of these schools that I mentioned. These are schools that are known for attracting intellectually driven and curious students. I would say that that attribute is one that unites their school cultures more. True, they lean left, and have a more tolerant view towards pot than many, but saying it is integral to their culture may be an overstatement. They are not known for an alcohol soaked social scene, as is more of the stereotype in some of their academic peers.

35

My son would not be happy at a conservative school. And BYU is certainly not on the table. I wasn’t asking for a sober school. I was asking for less weed-soaked school cultures. Here is his list, again: Dickinson, William and Mary, University of Delaware, University of Maryland (both College Park and Baltimore County), Hamilton, College of Wooster, Hamilton, Muhlenberg.

It’s not that I think a pot culture means kids don’t do well. My son was doing very well at school and out of school while smoking pot, but that doesn’t mean it’s okay to do it on a daily basis. He had a definite problem with it. We don’t want a repeat of that, and neither does he.

36

UMD will have everything but the universities are large enough that you can avoid it. Substance free housing is your best bet if he actively tries to avoid being around drunk and stoned people as freshman dorms are wild. Honors dorms are quieter (less likely to find inebriated/high students during the week) as well as some LLCs.

UNC Asheville has a reputation for tolerance toward weed. App state, NCSU, UNC Wilmington may all have a less tolerant culture, although there’s weed at App State too and lots of alcohol at NCSU.

You want to look globally and determine priorities in terms of substances. For instance, NCF would be a bad fit because of the weed prevalence. So it’d be automatically crossed out. Rollins doesn’t have a weed problem, but hard liquor is a problem, as is coke (not the soda). So, he wouldn’t be around kids high on pot, but drunk on cheap vodka and/or high on coke. Would that be OK for him, because he’s not interested, or more dangerous?

37

I agree that if he does a serious about it. he should pick sub free housing wherever he goes.

38

from what I have heard anecdotally, it is not an issue at Muhlenberg .

39

Can’t comment about Swarthmore, but as for Carleton … well, it sort of depends on your definition of “heavy” or of “integral” [li]. However, to give some concrete data, and to drive the point home on what other posters have been saying about how common pot is on college campuses in 2017:[/li]
Marijuana use by Carleton men:
Used in past year: 54.5%
“Currently” using: 34.8%

Carleton is not on the PR “Reefer Madness” list, and yet about half the students inhale at least once a year, and apparently more than half of those students do it regularly.

About 9.6% of students reported using other drugs (5.7% using ecstasy and 5.7% using hallucinogens). (This is actually a bit lower from my era, when LSD and mushrooms were big — about 10 or 20% according to one unscientific survey conducted by the school newspaper.) Hard drug use, however, is relatively rare at Carleton (cocaine 3.2%, opiates 0.4%, e.g.).

Source: 2015 Boynton Health Service Survey Team, University of Minnesota. 2015 College Student Health Survey Report: Health and Health-Related Behaviors: Carleton College Students, pages 17-23.

The same report also gives the following nation-wide averages for weed use: 35.5% within the past year, 20.6% regularly using. So, yeah, substance-free floors are probably advisable regardless of which school OP’s son ends up choosing.

[*] Based on my experience at Carleton, there’s probably a relatively small fraction of what I’d call truly heavy users while most are less frequent users (perhaps once/twice a week on Friday/Saturday nights, or a handful of times per term at occasions like end of finals, Halloween, Mai Fete). I probably wouldn’t call it “integral” to Carleton, though I’d say exactly the same about Reed; several relatives and acquaintances of mine are Reedies, and, AFAIK, none of them use drugs!

40

I think a huge party culture in general would make it harder for him (we took University of Richmond off of his list because a lot of kids online described their school as “work hard, play hard,” which is exactly what we have around here: kids who excel and think they deserve a medicinal reward for it.)

Alcohol has not been a problem yet, but I would be just as concerned if he began drinking at the level that he used marijuana. It was the frequency of it that concerned us, not the use of it at all. I am advising him not to join a fraternity if he goes to a school that has them, because of the drinking culture that goes with them. I should know, as I spent my entire college career binge drinking at fraternity parties :frowning:

I know there are exceptions, and that there are some non-traditional fraternities at some of the schools on his list. We will cross that bridge when we get there, if he’s interested.

I think he will make every effort to find kids who don’t use abuse substances. So maybe he would be fine anywhere, but I still thought we could stack the deck in his favor by avoiding some schools. So I am still interested in hearing about schools where weed is very, very prevalent (knowing that pot is prevalent everywhere).