The one thing they don’t tell you when you study abroad is how much free time you’ll have. They’ll let you know about the opportunities for travel, study, internships and all that. But they don’t tell you what to do otherwise.

So, as someone who spent last semester studying in Ireland, it comes to no surprise to hear that a University of Washington study recently announced findings that showed students significantly increased their drinking after studying abroad. It makes sense, due to a combination of freedom, boredom and expendable income.

While at their home universities, many college students have a lot of stuff to do. They’ll have classes, extracurriculars, errands to run, clubs and jobs. When students go abroad, most of that stuff vanishes. You hop on a plane, move into a new apartment, meet some new folks and wait for classes to start. If you’re lucky, you’ll have a mediocre TV that shows mostly Irish soap operas and made for TV movies.

Some kids join clubs, others academic groups. But finding a group that can take as much time as, let’s say, a student newspaper or a marching band, is rare. When classes start, it doesn’t change much. While studying at University College Cork, I took four classes and did an internship, but still only had a class or two a day. It’s not as though a job is an option either. At least in Ireland, you can’t get a job with a student visa, unless you want to be an undocumented worker getting paid under the table like one of my friends did selling produce.

You can do whatever you want with that time, which includes drinking. With a host of other international students all in the same situation, it happens a lot.

For students lucky enough to study abroad in Ireland, there’s no shortage of pubs. Mulligans, Fred Zeppelin’s, the Ovens, the Washington Inn, Cork provided a lot of places to get a pint. Paris, London, Barcelona, Rome and Madrid aren’t much different.

No one wants to be lame and stay in for the night. They say, “We’re in Europe, we have to go out.” Especially in Ireland, most things close between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m., and when all your friends don’t have class until at least noon, going out to the pubs on a Monday night doesn’t sound like a bad idea at all. This, of course, was after Thursday became the new Friday, Wednesday the new Thursday, Tuesday the new Wednesday until drinking became fair game on any night.

Now, one’s willingness to go all out like this depended on one major factor: money.

Studying abroad is about the most frivolous thing you can do. You need an expensive plane ticket, have to move into a new place, feed yourself, try to travel a lot and have a lot of shiny shops nearby. I’d already taken a loan from my father and came to the realization that a night out drinking cost about as much as a roundtrip ticket to London. I managed to find certain priorities (Hi Mom).

For other students, particularly those who go through independent programs such as the Butler University Institute for Study Abroad, money is less of a factor.

In Ireland, it quickly became apparent which kids had studied at the University of Massachusetts for financial reasons and decided to splurge for a semester and which kids were loaded. These were the kids that were all too ready to let you know about the other semesters they’d spent abroad, were expecting their families to just swing by Europe on a long weekend or were studying abroad after already graduating.

In some countries, like Ireland, students need to have a bank statement proving that they have a certain amount of money in a domestic bank. Some students also have to pay their rent for the semester up front, like in my apartment complex. So, should it come to a surprise to anyone that a group of students, taking classes that, when transferred back home, don’t count toward their GPAs, with at least $2,000 of party money in the bank are going out getting trashed? Not really.

This doesn’t even factor in that many American students studying abroad have the ability to legally drink for the first time or live in a country that has more cultural acceptance for casual drinking in the open. According to my friend Sami, who studied in Canterbury, students were informed at orientation that drinking in public was a great way to meet people.

Strangely enough, public drinking is illegal in Ireland.

Students studying in Barcelona have said that it costs more to buy the orange juice than the champagne to make a mimosa. They also sell vodka in three liter containers in the super market.

Europe really likes drinking. It makes sense. There’s not much else to do other than travel and take photos – and drink.

Nick O’Malley can be reached at [email protected].