Schaff: Like the Fed, Pitt needs to prevent human costs

Most Pitt students would rather party than discuss the causes of the Great Recession. Most Pitt students would rather party than discuss the causes of the Great Recession.

Be it because of the painful delay the depressed job market threatens to impose on their career prospects or the general failure of D.C. politicians to communicate economic reality, people on campus tend to steer away from econo-talk. Instead, they like to talk about alcohol.

Despite what you might assume, the two topics don’t have to be mutually exclusive. In fact, if you try to compare one aspect of the recession story — subprime lending — to one currently relevant aspect of alcohol on campus — underage drinking — the similarities are striking. What’s more, such a comparison shows how inadequate Pitt’s alcohol amnesty policy, even in its revised form, really is.

It’s all about risky behavior, the environment that fails to prevent that behavior and the safety net that minimizes the human cost once the gambling goes sour. These three characteristics apply to both the stories of underage drinking on campus and pre-recession subprime lending. Let’s delve deeper.

In the 1980s, the Depository Institution Deregulation and Monetary Control and Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions acts lifted the federally imposed caps on mortgage interest rates and allowed individuals to finance homebuying with much smaller down payments. This built the environment that allowed lending firms to indulge in a risky behavior: peddling subprime mortgages.

Subprime mortgages are home loans offered to low- and middle-income buyers whose questionable ability to pay bills would normally disqualify them for traditional loans. Because of their high risk, subprime loans often come with higher — or “adjustable” — interest rates. The growth in popularity of mortgage-backed securities — bundles of these subprime and more traditional loans that are traded in shares — and the historically low post-9/11 interest rates fueled a surge in subprime lending — and with it, an explosion of housing development and prices.

But when interest rates finally rose, the housing bubble burst and lower-income homeowners could no longer refinance their mortgages based on the rising value of their houses, gathering waves of default and foreclosure turned once-exalted mortgage-backed securities into “toxic waste.” These toxic assets severely undermined the balance sheets of the most elite firms on Wall Street, a major factor leading to the crisis of 2008. In essence, gambling gone sour helped bring the mighty American financial sector to its knees.

And as everyone knows, or laments, we taxpayers prevented the financial industry from self-destructing by bailing it out and buying up its “toxic waste.” But whatever pejorative jibe you aim at the bailouts or the Federal Reserve’s buy-up maneuvers, the reality is that with the bailouts, we correctly provided ourselves with a critical safety net — total financial collapse would have reaped untold, perhaps unspeakable human cost.

Bringing it back to alcohol — as if there’s anything else to talk about — it’s fascinating how closely collegiate underage drinking follows this model.

The risky behavior this time, of course, is consuming alcohol while under the legal age of 21. And just as was true for the lending industry, the regulatory environment fails to prevent students from deciding to gamble — and often more than lightly.

Think about it: Nothing is stopping underage people from getting cozy with over-21-year-olds, and campus police don’t randomly storm parties or search bookbags. Unsurprisingly, the resulting behavior matches the lax conditions: A 2001 Harvard study found that 43.6 percent of underage college students engage in binge drinking. To think that Pitt students are somehow insulated from that statistic is to be in denial.

As risky lending behavior can lead to widespread financial crisis, so too can risky drinking behavior cause personal medical crises, often in the form of alcohol poisoning. Akin to the Treasury and Federal Reserve propping up ailing banks to forestall economic disaster, universities across the country have chosen to build safety nets to minimize the human cost of drinking. Such nets are called alcohol amnesty policies.

By not burdening students with any worry of criminal records, the good amnesty policies unmask the pure, compassionate incentive of students to help their troubled friends, and in doing so they reduce the chance of shameful, unnecessary sickness and death. These “good policies” — those shared by CMU and Temple University — exempt both the helper and helped from underage citation.

Pitt’s new policy fails to exempt the helped individual. I believe it should.

Why? Because the only two ways to minimize the human cost of risky behavior are either prevention or outcome mitigation. Whereas the federal government has the power to work at both ends — it demonstrated its preventative power quite nicely before the 1980s, and its mitigative efforts are still present today — universities like Pitt have only outcomes to play with. Pitt should make the most of its sole feasible option. Our University should protect both the helper and the helped from underage citations.

Whoa, wait a minute. If Pitt became more compassionate, wouldn’t that promote even more risky drinking behavior in an environment that already facilitates it? Perhaps. But what’s clearer is that with or without a safety net, underage drinking would reign. For better or worse, alcohol has ingrained itself in the average student’s conception of natural rewards. However austere Pitt makes its policy, it can expect students to flock to alcohol hoping to create friendships, alleviate anxiety and loosen sexual inhibitions.

Don’t get me wrong, a Pitt community that floats in alcohol is not the ideal. But offering only perfunctory, half-compassion doesn’t bring us close enough to a safe community.

Email Matt Schaff at matthew.schaff@gmail.com.