Peter Antaramian has seen the worry on parents’ faces.
“I’m sure there’s not a parent in the world who doesn’t send their child to college with every imaginable fear,” said the senior at the University of Wisconsin and president of the Wisconsin Student Union. “I’ve seen the look on their faces as they drop the kids off.”
But whether parents worry about a student’s academic achievement, social adjustment or physical safety, those concerns often radiate from a common threat: the widespread abuse of alcohol on college campuses.
Binge drinking kills an estimated 50 college students per year nationally, a small number compared to deaths from illness or accident. But binge drinking is still considered a national public health issue.
It’s not just a problem at “party schools;” the most celebrated case, in which a freshman drank himself to death, took place at prestigious MIT. It’s also not just a problem at fraternities; in fact, a number of fraternities have banned alcohol, and many others have implemented “risk management”strategies to minimize overserving and consumption by underage drinkers.
And it’s not just a problem for students who drink; it’s a problem for those who share dorm or fraternity or campus space with them. But what, exactly, is the problem, and what are campuses doing about it?
A biannual survey from the Harvard School of Public Health, first issued in 1993, defined and named the problem. The survey defined binge drinking as a man’s taking five drinks or a woman’s taking four at a single sitting. The survey reported that 44 percent of all college students were binge drinkers.
In response to the survey, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation funded A Matter of Degree, a campus-community partnership intended to change the culture at some of the nation’s heaviest-drinking schools. Despite those efforts, or perhaps because they have not been copied widely enough, the most recent Harvard survey (1999)shows no change in the rate of campus problem drinking. Bingeing is down in dormitories but up among students living off campus.
The University of Wisconsin at Madison, until recently No. 2 in the Princeton Review’s ranking of the nation’s “party schools,” is a Matter of Degree campus. (This year Madison fell to No. 9 on the party list; Louisiana State University ranked No. 1. Absent from the top 20 is the University of Illinois.) According to Aaron Brower, a social work professor and the university’sprincipal investigator on the project, two-thirds of its student body (67 percent) binge drink.
“Is it considered to be a terrific thing to be falling down dead drunk? If so, you need a culture change,” says Mary K. Rouse, assistant vice chancellor. “On the one hand, we have a small number of students who do drink heavily–on the other, we have students who are vegetarians, who don’t drink or use other drugs,” she said. “It’s important to think about binge drinking as a pattern separate from alcoholism,” Brower said. He defined binge drinking as when “you go to a bar and you drink a lot and you drink to get drunk,” adding that binge drinking doesn’t necessarily lead to alcoholism.
“It seems to stop when you stop going to college,” Brower said.
According to Sandra Hoover, deputy director of A Matter of Degree, the school looked at traditional approaches that tried to change individual behavior and realized that wasn’t sufficient.
“Hard-drinking campuses are often surrounded by concentrations of bars, maybe 100 or 120 liquor licenses within a mile,” Hoover said. “Their college newspapers feature ads for 25-cent beers and other drink specials, while their schedules include few Friday classes–the weekend may begin Wednesday.”
In this context, Hoover said, “you can’t expect to educate people one on one and expect them not to drink. They’re going into an environment that encourages people to drink more and more, and unsafely.”
Thus, A Matter of Degree initiatives emphasize changing the community environment.
Wisconsin now provides alternative late-night activities, makes bar license renewals contingent on the elimination of drink specials and encourages bar owners to enhance activities such as pool or dancing, which take the focus off drinking.
Students who still drink to excess are made responsible for their impact on others. Dean of Students Alicia F. Chavez said that she has found it effective to “create situations where students are held accountable to the community. If they threw up on the carpet, I would arrange for them to work half a day with the custodial staff and see how horrible it is to have to clean up after that.”
Focusing on the external consequences of heavy drinking is typical of A Matter of Degree campuses. Though those consequences are familiar to parents from their own college years, “the problems [today] are more serious,” said Brower. “If you drank, passed out and woke up the next morning and were fine, it wasn’t a problem. It’s a problem if you get drunk and start a fight, you get drunk and you tear down a bulletin board, you get drunk and you rape somebody or have sex with somebody you don’t want to.” Hoover’s shorthand for the problems is “the 3 V’s: violence, vandalism and vomit.”
Some Matter of Degree campuses embrace “social norming” campaigns, the term given to efforts to reduce alcohol abuse by correcting perceptions of the abuse and showing that heavy drinking is the exception rather than the rule on campus, thereby depriving students of the rationale that “everybody does it.”
First tried at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb 10 years ago, this approach has yielded some impressive results. At Northern, perceptions of alcohol abuse dropped from 69 percent in 1990 to 33 percent in 1998, while heavy drinking itself went down to 25 percent from 45 percent. But researchers caution that single-campus results fail to demonstrate the superiority of social norming to its alternatives, and in September, authors of the Harvard study published findings stating that more students underestimate the problem of heavy drinking than overestimate it.
“One important missing component of the social-norming approach is the issue of underage drinking,” Hoover said. “Underage drinkers actually make up the biggest percentage of binge drinkers. This approach tells students it’s okay to drink as long as you drink in moderation,” she said.
“The thing that works is decreasing anonymity,” Brower said, “with first-year students in particular, helping students find niches for themselves.”
He cited Madison’s residential learning communities, dormitories with integrated academic programs, as one successful effort to give students a sense of belonging.
“The students who feel more connected drink differently,” he said. “The exception that proves the rule are the fraternities and sororities, where the students feel connected to tight communities but the communities have drinking at their core–in those cases, the drinking is worse.”
Fraternity drinking is notorious but also easier to regulate.
At Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, said Hoover, “They revised their policies about fraternity parties: If you’re going to serve alcohol, there must be third-party vendors; the amount of alcohol must be proportionate to the number of guests over 21. They implemented this policy last year and saw the alcohol incident rate go down by 42 or 43 percent.”
At MIT, by contrast, ScottKrueger’s fatal fraternity-house binge caused the university to prohibit fraternity living for freshmen.
Madison has no plans to impose a similar restriction.
“We only have 7,000 spaces in the residence halls,” said Rouse, while the student population is 40,000. The creation of community is a particular challenge when 80 percent of the students live off-campus.
Notwithstanding the talk about community, Antaramian, stressed individual choice.
“You can’t stop all the drinking. Hopefully you can create awareness and responsible individuals.”
At the same time, he acknowledged the culture: “Wisconsin students study hard and party hard.” The Union offers late-night programs, such as midnight movies and Club 770, which from 9 p.m. to 2 a.m. provides a clublike atmosphere without alcohol. But, Antaramian said, “if it can happen at MIT, it could happen anywhere.”
The issue, and the divergence of attitudes between administration and students, appears even on campuses not known as “party schools.” At Washington University in St. Louis, administrative efforts are focused on having students drink safely and making them understand that extreme drinking is not the social norm. Assistant Dean Joel Anderson, co-chairman of the university’s Committee on Alcohol, reports that 77 percent of Washington University students have four drinks or fewer when they party. Luke McIntosh, a senior at Washington and a student member of the committee, points out that even those numbers may overstate the alcohol problem, and that overstating the problem is itself a problem.
“I’m 235 pounds, so five drinks isn’t going to affect me if it’s taken over 2 1/2 hours. I wouldn’t be affected but I’d be a binge drinker. There is a heightened sense among students that everybody drinks at `Wash U,’ which isn’t true, so we’re doing this social norming campaign to correct that misimpression.”
Anderson said that at competitive schools like Washington, students justify their drinking as an antidote to academic pressure. Playing off that drive for achievement, Anderson said that the university is pushing the message that being a high-performance student means “not so exhausting yourself during periods of supposed relaxation that you’ve got to recover from your recovery period.” Though Northwestern University banned alcohol at pregame tailgate parties, “A lot of people would just get drunk before they left in the morning or they’d drink at their frat or their dorm room,” said recent graduate Dave Dreyer. “It definitely didn’t take alcohol out of the environment.” The ban strikes him as bizarre: “Something as extreme as eliminating the existence of tailgating, that’s ridiculously extreme, over the edge. I don’t even think parents think that’s appropriate–my dad’s like, `You can’t tailgate?'”
Hoover said that the early results of A Matter of Degree show a drop in secondhand effects: the impact that alcohol has on other people. But student resistance is a significant obstacle.
As Brower said, “As soon as you clamp down, then students demand to drink as if it’s a constitutional right.”
BINGEING FACTS
– Consuming alcohol quickly is extremely dangerous for anybody, mainly because it takes about 30 minutes for the alcohol to absorb into the bloodstream.
– Sometimes the effects of alcohol continue to grow even after a person has passed out from being drunk.
– One or two drinks strike the outer part of the brain, diminishing judgment; more drinks push deeper until the base of the brain, which is responsible for basic life functions such as heartbeat and breathing, becomes affected.
– A drink is defined as 12 ounces of beer, 4 ounces of wine, 12 ounces of wine cooler or 1.25 ounces of liquor.
– A student’s definition of binge drinking depends on his or her own drinking level. The more a student drinks, the higher the measure the student applies.
– As the number of frequent binge drinkers rose since 1993 (to 23 percent from 20 percent), so did the number of abstainers, to 19 percent from 15 percent.
– The liver breaks down alcohol in the body and is therefore the chief site of alcohol damage.
Sources: Dr. Bret Ginther of the University of California at Irvine Medical Center, The Journal of American College Health, Columbia University Home Medical Guide and Harvard School of Public Health survey by Henry Wechsler, Bryn Austin and William DeJong
