I live in Norway. A beer costs around 85-90nok (around $9.50USD or 9.02€). It would be really easy to spend $50. That's 5 beers, and I'm not entirely certain that the student houses are really that cheap here. [1]

Folks counter this by pre-drinking at home and then going home to continue drinking. It really wouldn't be that difficult in the US either, and some folks would certainly leave you behind if you can't keep up financially.

Fun fact: Austria is cheap in comparison, at about 2,50€ to 3,50€ per beer, and it seems like a comparative deal. [2]

[1]https://norwaytoday.info/travel/is-beer-in-norway-really-tha.... [2]https://www.flatio.com/blog/typical-prices-of-goods-in-austr....

It wouldn’t be difficult if you set out to do so but as a broke student you devise strategies to not spend that much money…For example would often also meet at someone’s house and drink beers bought at the supermarket. It all depends on if there’s a culture of spending a lot of money and where I went to school at least, there was definitely a culture of not spending a lot of money (at least not as college students).

9 euro for a beer is downright criminal - most likely your government is taxing alcohol because they don't trust your personal judgement.

The UK also heavily taxes alcohol but you'll find cheap beers (sure, some London pubs will still charge you 5£ or more for some beers).

It’s a difference in attitude and thus a difference in magnitude. Alcohol tax in Norway is about $100 a litre while in the UK it is about $25 a litre - so $2 per US pint vs $0.50 per pint.

Even the latter reduces hard core binge drinking and the former really seems to help with the rampant alcoholism in winter at high latitudes. Paternalistic, but that is the price of living in a society (with free healthcare systems and A&E that get overtaxed by drunks…)

Beer is notoriously inexpensive in a fair number of european countries. When I first visited from Canada, I was shocked at how much beer I could get in Germany for $5 euro or something

Israel is a lot more expensive (alcohol very highly taxed) but we knew the cheap student pub in a basement where you could get good deals on the cheapest beer pitchers to share around the table. Even if the beer was $8 per unit I wouldn't rack a $50-100 tab every weekend as a poor student.

And to Europeans, the price of our beer (especially in major cities) is also often shocking. They wanted $5 for a pint! ;)

For $5 you could get well drinks in Chicago on a weeknight. (The $50-100 bar tab came from drinking 10 of them...)