The Mistake Colleges Make About Student Drinking
http://chronicle.comSection: Commentary
Volume 54, Issue 34, Page A34
By Brandon Busteed, founder and chief executive of Outside the Classroom, a company that deals with campus drinking problems.
We've got it all wrong when it comes to preventing high-risk drinking on college campuses.
Despite conventional wisdom, the alcohol problem colleges face is not mainly about high-risk drinkers, and the solution is not about intervening with them alone. If it were, we'd have declared success long ago because we have invested so much time, money, and resources doing just that. Yet our studies show that, despite a handful of solid efforts in the realm of primary prevention, most colleges take a group-think approach to identifying and intervening with high-risk drinkers. The solution lies instead in a counterintuitive approach: working with the 80 percent of students who are not frequent heavy drinkers, and changing their ideas about what constitutes normal college drinking habits.
My company, Outside the Classroom, develops programs to counter alcohol abuse in higher education. Working with more than 500 colleges and universities across the country last year, we surveyed 450,000 freshmen about their drinking habits. We found that comparatively few students are problematic drinkers, and, in fact, other studies have found that the majority of negative consequences from drinking on our campuses come from the population of students who are light-to-moderate drinkers and infrequent bingers. There are three times more such drinkers than frequent heavy drinkers — the two groups account for about 60 and 20 percent, respectively, of college students. Thus, while we need to make major changes in the frequent heavy-drinker category to reduce their risk to a reasonable level, we need only make modest changes among the light-to-moderate drinkers to yield far fewer negative consequences.
The Harvard School of Public Health's College Alcohol Study has produced data that correlate specific levels of consumption (by number of drinks consumed) with relative risk for negative consequences. For example, a moderate drinker who typically has four drinks has a risk factor of 14, while a heavy drinker who typically drinks nine or more has a risk factor of 33. The heavy drinker has more than double the risk of injury than the moderate one, but because the moderate drinker has three times more friends who drink like him, the moderates incurred more injuries over all than the heavy drinkers.
Given such research, how should colleges change their approach to dealing with drinking on their campuses?
First, institutions need to be proactive in their approaches to student drinking. It is essential to educate students before they develop problematic drinking habits — specifically, either before or during the first few weeks of their freshman year.
Why? Because, according to our surveys, every fall college administrators witness a significant change for the worse in students' alcohol consumption immediately after they arrive on a campus as first-year students — a change I call the "college effect." While some students are problematic drinkers before they arrive, many more — in fact, a majority — are abstainers when they begin college. On average, about half of incoming first-year students are abstainers, while just under a quarter are binge drinkers. Within the first six weeks of being on the campus, however, the percentage of students abstaining drops to about 30 percent, and the percentage of bingers grows to about 45 percent. In other words, binge drinking almost doubles and abstention decreases by nearly half in just six weeks — and those numbers will change very little over the course of the next four years. The binge rate will stay at roughly 44 percent, and the abstainers will decline to about 19 percent.
The single greatest gap in alcohol-free programming by student organizations occurs during those critical first six weeks of the school year, when student organizations are at their weakest in terms of combating the influence of the "college effect." Alcohol-free orientation events typically take place during only the first two or three days of new students' arrival. The easiest and most common activity for students to organize in those early weeks remains informal parties with alcohol. Colleges should create new ways to communicate about alcohol with students during the summer, and perhaps even during recruitment and admissions.
We should provide as much visibility for the nondrinking lifestyle on campus as there is for the drinking lifestyle, and emphasize that alcohol is a common crutch limiting the potential of generations of students. Colleges can offer student organizations the staff support, event-planning assistance, and money needed for truly engaging social events that don't feature alcohol. We can also promote nondrinking groups and events on social-networking sites and create environments for socializing without alcohol (a 24/7 coffee shop, for example).
We also need to find new ways to empower the students who either don't drink at all or who only drink moderately. Colleges should tap more into what those students think — and surveying them is a good start. Working with students' responses to questions like "Would you like to find out about alcohol-free social activities on campus?" or "What kind of activities would you like us to offer?," institutions can then pinpoint ways to reduce problem drinking.
Responding to students' concerns may be as simple as providing them with the results of the survey or as complex as rearranging the housing system to accommodate substance-free dorms or halls. In a recent analysis that Outside the Classroom conducted, we found that housing choices by students are predictors of risk for negative consequences from high-risk drinking.
Out of six possible housing selections in our survey, which included a fraternity or sorority house, residence hall, on-campus apartment, off-campus apartment, substance-free housing, and living at home, traditional residence halls were the second-riskiest option, following fraternity houses. Even the configuration of rooms within dormitories indicates risk. Andrew Wall, an assistant professor of educational leadership at the University of Rochester, has found that single rooms are less risky than doubles, which are less risky than triples. And "suite-style" living is less risky than the standard "floors," while co-ed housing is less risky than same-sex housing — something to be said, perhaps, for respect for the opposite sex and accountability among a smaller group of peers sharing a bathroom. Though we still have a lot to learn in this realm, university officials can make strategic choices when it comes to housing that will have a big impact on negative consequences from high-risk drinking.
Successful models for curbing student drinking do exist. The Higher Education Center for Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse and Violence Prevention (
http://www.higheredcenter.org), supported by the Department of Education, has emphasized the importance of "environmental management" in curbing alcohol abuse. Environmental management is a comprehensive approach that begins with a holistic review of the campus environment, its constituencies, and its surroundings, then takes action through a combined campus-community group that enforces alcohol laws and policies and works with local restaurants and bars to end drink specials and "ladies free" nights. For example, the University of Nebraska at Lincoln began working with local police to map which bars, restaurants, and off-campus houses were most often attended by students who commit alcohol violations. Police used "last drink" surveys when booking students to determine where they consumed their last alcoholic drink. Then the campus-community coalition would present the data to the owners and ask them to improve their acts. Only those who didn't work to improve were later pursued through other penalty-based means.
But most institutions have a tough time setting up systemic and sustainable programs to combat alcohol abuse. Most student-affairs administrators don't have adequate staff, budget, or authority to really tackle the problem. Few, if any, boards base any measure of their president's performance review on his or her (and the college's) alcohol-prevention efforts. There has also been little recognition for presidents who are making solid contributions toward high-risk-drinking prevention. Presidents and trustees certainly care about the health of their students and the reputations of their institutions, but together they haven't yet created the tools, protocols, and incentives that drive accountability.
In fact, the three biggest problems in making environmental management work are a lack of leadership, financial support, and campus-level data to measure and chart progress. Leadership must come from the top: trustees, presidents, and vice presidents for student affairs. Financial resources are, of course, always in short supply in higher education — but what is spent on alcohol prevention compared with other programs is small given the potentially catastrophic consequences that can, and are, caused by students' drinking. Finally, each college needs a rigorous process of data collection and measurement of variables like judicial violations, emergency-room visits, property damage, and sexual assaults related to alcohol. That will require resources, too, of course — of both time and money — but without them, an institution will have no way of measuring the problem or its approach to confronting it.
To prevent alcohol abuse on campuses, we need to shift our thinking, commitment, and resource allocation toward the 80 percent of students we have largely ignored. We can alter the college drinking culture if the moderate drinkers make modest changes. We'll know we have succeeded when we can talk about "college" and not think "alcohol."
Brandon Busteed is founder and chief executive of Outside the Classroom, a company that deals with campus drinking problems.
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