Bingeing Stays Same At Colleges Despite Efforts By Schools, Heavy Drinking Fails To Decline Among Student Bodies
College campuses are becoming increasingly polarized between students who binge drink frequently and teetotalers who abstain.
The Harvard School of Public Health’s college alcohol study, released Tuesday, surveyed 14,000 students at 119 colleges last year - including four in Washington and Idaho.
Published this month in the Journal of American College Health, the study found that the population of students who are binge drinking - approximately 44 percent, or 2 out every 5 students - has remained roughly the same this decade.
“Despite all of the attention given to this problem and efforts colleges are making, there has been no national improvement,” said Harvard researcher Henry Wechsler, a social psychologist who led the study.
The number of abstainers has increased slightly, but so has the number of students who binge drink frequently - up from 19.8 percent in 1993 to 22.7 percent in 1999.
Students most likely to binge drink are white, male and living in a fraternity, with a history of drinking in high school, the study found. Nearly 80 percent of fraternity and sorority members binge drink, Wechsler said.
Binge drinking is defined as a man having at least five drinks in a row at least once in the two weeks before the survey. For a woman, the number of drinks is four in a row for the same period of time.
Those least likely to binge drink were black or Asian, over age 24, married and without a history of high-school drinking.
The one-quarter of college students who binge drink frequently drink two-thirds of all the alcohol consumed by college students, the study found. Those students also contribute to more than 60 percent of all alcohol-related campus problems.
“The problem is that a vocal and visible minority of students begin to set the tone for the university’s reputation,” said Ed McGlothlin, an abstainer from Florida State University, considered the nation’s top party school.
The study found that frequent bingers were seven times more likely to miss class than students who drink but don’t binge, five times more likely to forget where they were or what they did the night before and 10 times more likely to damage property.
Nonbingeing students also reported being affected by the “second-hand effects” of drinking, such as being insulted, assaulted or having to help a drunken student.
Wechsler questioned the effectiveness of college programs that rely too heavily on educational efforts, because many binge-drinking students don’t believe they have a problem.
Though 97 percent of universities have general alcohol education programs, approximately 20 percent, including Washington State University, are also using “social norming” campaigns designed to influence student perceptions about what is normal drinking behavior among peers.
Wechsler said colleges should make more efforts to reduce the supply of alcohol to students.
Approximately 87 percent of universities prohibit keg sales to fraternities and sororities, including WSU and the University of Idaho. But the study found that large, public colleges were less likely to ban alcohol at home tailgate events and prohibit advertisements for off-campus bars in campus newspapers or bulletin boards.
In Pullman, booze flows freely at tailgating parties and alcohol advertising targeting students is common in the local grocery stores and in the student newspaper.
“The specials and marketing of alcohol is one of the forces that drive students to binge drinking,” Wechsler said. “You have to approach the problem from both the educational and economic methods.”
Because it’s cheap to drink, universities need more low-cost alternative activities for students, Wechsler said. WSU officials hope the new student recreation center taking shape on the east side of campus will help fill that niche.
Though WSU stopped short of banning alcohol outright on Greek Row - it’s still allowed in the private rooms of those who are legal drinking age - some fraternities are taking that step themselves. WSU’s Farm-House fraternity and the recently reestablished Beta Theta Pi chapter are promoting themselves as alcohol-free fraternities.
“We do not want alcohol to define our Greek experience,” Beta Theta Pi President Braydn Leyde says on the fraternity’s Web site. “We create an atmosphere that supports a six pack of Mountain Dew, not a six pack of beer.”
Eleven fraternities at Oregon universities also have gone dry voluntarily.
Changing the drinking culture must go beyond efforts aimed just at students, University of Iowa President Mary Sue Coleman said. At Iowa, alcohol is no longer served at presidential functions, football brunches and other university-sponsored social events.
WSU officials and regents have been developing a comprehensive alcohol plan that outlines several new community and research initiatives to address student drinking. The plan is expected out this spring, along with a new set of standards for Greek houses and a proposal to create a Greek Alliance, a framework for better managing the Greek system.
WSU officials say they are trying to address the issue from multiple angles - from establishing community coalitions and agreements with alcohol providers to promoting personal responsibility among students.
“Rather than setting more rules that they will break, this is a more systemic approach so you don’t have to address the behavior in a punitive fashion,” said Al Jamison, interim associate vice provost for student affairs.
This sidebar appeared with the story:
ONLINE
The Harvard School of Public Health’s college alcohol study, released Tuesday, surveyed 14,000 students at 119 colleges last year - including four in Washington and Idaho.
To read the study on the Internet go to http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/cas