Whereas the average Nijmegen student scores a meager 7 at examinations, boozers (more than twenty glasses per week) get stuck at a 6.3. The poorer achievements are also expressed in the total number of credits attained per year, as the researchers have calculated: 53 for normal drinkers, 42 for heavy drinkers.

Most heavy drinkers are men. One in four men tosses down more than twenty glasses every week, as against merely three out of every one hundred women. In eight percent of the men the study suffers from such boozing behavior, compared with less than 1.5 percent of the women.

Vox also discovered that philosophy, law and management sciences in Nijmegen are the departments where most heavy drinkers accumulate; the beta departments ranks fourth. Beer rules the roost in Nijmegen.

Prof. dr. Reinout Wiers calls the survey in Vox interesting because he thinks that until now there were only American figures available about the connection between drinking and achievements. Wiers, who conducts research into addiction among youngsters, is hardly concerned about the boozing students. This group divides the glasses over more drinking moments per week than secondary-school pupils, for instance, and besides, the risk of brain damage in a 21-year-old is considerably lower than in a 14-year-old, in whom important areas in the brain still have to develop./.