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<p>Yes. “Freezing to death” in the snow might well have been alcohol poisoning, at least in part. If you’re blacking out, passing out, or vomiting, you’re endangering your health, and to some degree kids are more aware of that than they used to be, although I don’t think that knowledge has slowed them down.</p>
<p>“What’s going on? Are kids actually drinking more now than we did 30 years ago? In the words of the Dartmouth student, that doesn’t seem physically possible. Have the categories changed, so that people call an ambulance rather than just holding a kid’s hand while he or she vomits? Or is there really some physical difference in the way kids are responding to too much alcohol?”</p>
<p>Well, dealing with this is something I do for a living, so…</p>
<p>Fewer kids are drinking than 30 years ago. There are more abstainers. And probably more moderate drinkers.</p>
<p>HOWEVER, the data I have suggests strongly that drinking at the prestige colleges (which make up a tiny fraction of the college population, where the average undergraduates age is 24.5 years) is significantly higher than 30 years ago. There is more hard liquor (very, very few people end up in an ambulance from beer, and that usually from a window fall or some such), binge drinking is up (though slightly lower than five years ago), and heavy drinking (nearly daily, 2 or more drinks a day) is up (at my alma mater, it is at 29% of the student body, according to the college’s own data, and that is likely an underestimate.) A Duke med. school/hospital study found that 29% of Duke students had experienced an alcohol blackout in the past year; and almost 10% in the past two weeks. For the most part, this just doesn’t happen with beer.</p>
<p>To be fair, there are massive differences even at the prestige colleges. They shouldn’t all be treated with a single brush stroke. Factors associated with heavy drinking include: rural, white, northeast or northern midwest, non-religious, heavy spectator sport participation, residential and few commuters, fraternities, high median income, co-ed. Dartmouth has all of the above, so there is no great surprise.</p>
<p>Of course, getting so drunk that you go to sleep in a snowdrift was a serious thing. But that was a sensational anomaly. Mainly what happened was people got so drunk that they threw up, felt sorry for themselves, went to bed, felt the room spinning, threw up again, swore not to let this happen again, and eventually slept it off. Was that a good thing? No, of course not. But is that what gets called “alcohol poisoning” these days?</p>
<p>Alcohol poisoning is considered a “drug overdose” characterized by the individual being extremely disoriented, unresponsive, or unconscious. There are usually physical signs as well, including skin discoloration, shallow breathing, failure to be roused, etc.</p>
<p>So WHY is there more binge drinking at prestige colleges (meeting your criteria) today as opposed to 30 years ago?</p>
<p>Beats me. You have any idea? (I can wax socio-psychobabble as well as the next person, but…)</p>
<p>Speculation I’ve heard about an increase in binge drinking is that it has to do with raising the drinking age to 21 and “forcing” kids to drink behind closed doors and presumably more quickly before they go out for the night. I think there’s more to it than just that, but that’s part of it.</p>
<p>With regard to the solution being in the admissions office, I agree with that, but I am not so sure exactly what the admissions office is supposed to do. Not accept athletes who play sports that traditionally have higher drinking rates? Sounds like that would call for eliminating the football or hockey team, which is not the admissions office’s call. It’s not like they can just ask what the student’s plans are for drinking in college. I think of the factors that have been cited for correlating with high drinking rates, the only thing possibly within the control of the admissions office would seem to be trying to change the socio-economic make-up of the school. Even if they did make significant efforts to admit a less white and less affluent group of students, I wonder how the yield would be among that group. It’d still be a tough sell.</p>
<p>I am the parent of a non-drinking varsity athlete (soccer, not football or hockey), and I am concerned about where he will find a high level of soccer without the heavy drinking. I worry that he’ll get very interested in a school’s team, be invited for an overnight (if he’s lucky) and then find out that the overnight is basically to see how much liquor he can hold. I feel for the kid that Interesteddad knows who’s not liking the drinking culture at Dartmouth, because I know there is a lot to love about the college, and I think it would be easy to think that one could overlook an albeit significant part of the culture in April of senior year of high school and then be disappointed to find out otherwise in the middle of freshman year of college. Why is he staying? I don’t know, but if enough kids like that do manage to stick it out and not transfer, perhaps the culture will slowly change.</p>
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<p>I don’t know if it’s a high level of soccer, but I found it very interesting that the soccer coach at Swarthmore will not allow any student to be on the team if they join one of the two fraternities.</p>
<p>I’m sure that the Swarthmore soccer players drink as much or as little as any other students at the school, but I wish more coaches would take a stand like that. I’ve never laid eyes on that soccer coach, but I love him!</p>
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<p>As for students who knowingly choose to attend (and stay at) heavy party schools, part of it is that the entire system tells them that “it’s like that everywhere”.</p>
<p>I saw a kid posting on the Washington and Lee forum the other day saying that he was interested in the school, but didn’t want a heavy drinking environment. Good lordie, Miss Molly. The school has 85% fraternity membership and was furious recently when it lost its #1 ranking in the “booze flows freely” lists.</p>
<p>What do the W&L students tell the kid? Oh…there’s lots to do without drinking. Yeah…and the check’s in the mail, too.</p>
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<p>As I understand, the Dartmouth student gave serious consideration to transfering after freshman year. But, you know the drill…it’s an IIIIIIvy…</p>
<p>If Guantanemo prison were accepted into the Ivy League, there would be plenty of kids volunteering for four years of waterboarding and barking dogs.</p>
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<p>Note which high schools are sending drunks to the college, stop accepting applicants from those high schools, and tell those high schools why. It wouldn’t take many years of admissions drought at these prep and affluent suburban high schools for guidances offices to start differentiating between applications from drunks and non-drunks.</p>
<p>It’s not even that complicated. These colleges are accepting kids with drunk infractions on their high school records. They ignore the issue which is misguided negative-reinforcement for students who don’t spend their high school weekends drunk.</p>
<p>I like that approach of the Swarthmore soccer coach, too. I think that a lot of the drinking culture of athletic teams does come with at least tacit approval of the coach. Surely coaches know when the team takes the prospective team members out and gets them as drunk as possible. Of course, I also know that that sort of visit is a selling point with a lot of kids. </p>
<p>What were the W&L students telling the prospective students? I imagine a lot of what we heard when we visited and toured Dartmouth this summer. They downplayed the presence of fraternities and talked about how non-exclusive they were. And if anyone asked about drinking, they assured the person asking that plenty of people didn’t drink and that they wouldn’t be a social outcast if they didn’t drink. I think I hear things like that with a lot more skepticism than the average 17-year-old does when touring a college campus.</p>
<p>I see the appeal in just blacklisting certain schools, because it would be easy, but I think that’s a bit too heavy handed. There is a lot of heavy drinking at my kids’ big public school, but it wouldn’t be fair to the non-drinkers/non-troublemakers to blacklist the entire school. In the top 10 kids in my D’s class, three were heavy drinkers, and two of them, based on ethnicity and activities, would probably have been the least suspected. If they had had drinking infractions noted on their school records, that would have been easy, but I don’t know how often the school is made aware of such things. I am certain that our guidance office had no idea how much or how often those three students drank.</p>
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<p>Yep. Same Eddie Haskell canned spiel nonsense. “Gee, Mrs Cleaver, that’s a lovely dress you’re wearing today…” We heard it at every school, too. </p>
<p>I wish they would add a column for “binge drinking rate” to the USNEWS rankings formula. Now that would focus some attention on the issue. It would help drunks and non-drunks better select appropriate schools.</p>
<p>I know that one of the things I looked up for every school my daughter considered was the frat/sorority membership rates. They can say there’s plenty for the “Goddamn Independents” (GDIs) to do on campus, but when the rate is 80%? Cut me a break. Plenty to do as long as you enjoy sitting in your room alone on Friday and Saturday nights…</p>
<p>When the Greek participation rate is 80%. it’s hardly exclusive. </p>
<p>I went to a CC “top tier” university that was 15% Greek and the one guy who got alcohol poisoning during my 4 years at the school was an nonaffiliate drinking with his nonGreek buddies in the dorm.</p>
<p>I find it difficult to imagine that there is any college in the country where only one person got alcohol poisoning in a 4 year period.</p>
<p>Another simple approach to the drinking would be to greatly expand the use of substance free dorms. Make the most desirable dorms substance free, raise the percent of dorms designated as sub free above the proportion of students who request such housing, then enforce the rules in those dorms. Announce up front that you are doing this, and that the proportion of sub free will rachet up each year to some figure similar to the percent of students who are underage. These measures would appeal to the non drinking kids, discourage the drinkers, and not risk unfairly tainting a sober student from a high school with a drinking culture.</p>
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Although I sympathize with the attitude, I think a Brown coach tried this and got pilloried for violating the students’ independence. This was at a place with very low frat participation.</p>
<p>Of course, it is well within the coach’s rights to institute curfews, tell the athletes that drinking (as opposed to simply belonging to a frat) is incompatible with playing, schedule morning practices on Sat and Sun (assuming your athletes are hard core enough to put up with this), and bench or drop from the team people whose indulgences lead to college disciplinary events or “discredit to the team”. These measures actually would be a lot easier at the serious athletic D1 schools, where the athletes are really professionals and screwing up their participation in their sport is like drinking themselves out of a job. At the Ivies, and similar elite private uni’s and LAC’s, almost no one expects to make a career out of the sport, so at some point the drinkers would just drop the sport rather than stop drinking. Yes, that is virtually a definition of an alcoholic.</p>
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This was something in hindsight that we should have considered but didn’t. H. and I both attended large state U.s where we did not participate in Greek life (but it was not a big deal). Our older children went to schools—one with no frats/sororities and the other with about 30% (but didn’t participate). </p>
<p>The school our youngest chose had 50% Greek involvement and he thought that it would be fine–he didn’t know if he wanted it or not esp. since no one close to him had ever been involved. Turned out that due to academic pressure, fear of too much time commitment during pledging, and questionable hazing practices that he didn’t join. Now he is finding out as a soph. that most of social life does revolve around Greeks.</p>
<p>It is interesting though, on his campus, no school athletes are permitted to be in frats/sororities.</p>
<p>“Speculation I’ve heard about an increase in binge drinking is that it has to do with raising the drinking age to 21 and “forcing” kids to drink behind closed doors and presumably more quickly before they go out for the night. I think there’s more to it than just that, but that’s part of it.”</p>
<p>It’s a good theory, but binge drinking, heavy drinking, drinking at all, alcohol-related motor vehicle fatalities among 18-21 year olds are all DOWN since the higher drinking age went into effect. It is hard to find a public health regulation that has been more effective.</p>
<p>It is only up (from what I can tell) at a smallish number of American residential colleges and universities.</p>
<p>The colleges don’t like to talk about what is going on. In my last visit with d. to my alma mater, the tour guide and admissions rep pooh-poohed all mention of drinking. That evening my d. stayed over. The women started drinking before dinner (a Thursday night) and took flasks with them to a capella concerts. Since then, the college has become very open about it. 29% of the student body is made up of heavy (near daily) drinkers. 48% binge drinking rates in previous two weeks. Rates among white males are almost 30% higher. It got so bad that the college this year spent $5.2 million revamping its entire residential/social system to try to get a handle on it. And though I doubt it is going to work (I agree that the “answer” needs to start in the admissions office), I give them a lot of credit for trying.</p>
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<p>I think colleges are sitting up and taking notice of the skyrocketing demand for sub-free housing. It is important to note from Mini’s professional data that, while hard-core drinking is a major problem, there are also increasing percentages of non-drinkers or light drinkiers at the elite schools.</p>
<p>Colleges understand that they can drive this important customer base away if they are perceived as being Animal House institutions.</p>
<p>One of the problems is that high school students don’t understand college life. They often have the misguided notion that, unless a college is a known “party school”, they won’t have any fun in college. They don’t understand that the differences in a low-binge drinking rate college and a high-binge drinking rate college are really centered around the prominence of “Otis the Town Drunk” alcohol consumption on campus. I don’t think our kids who attend low-binge drinking schools would have any difficulty finding a party with a room full of sweaty college kids dancing and drinking booze on a Saturday night. The difference is that most Saturday nights don’t end up with kids being hauled away in ambulances. If you can get the heavy Otis the Town Drunk binge drinking levels down below the point of critical mass, the campus culture and community expectation of behavior changes.</p>
<p>“It is important to note from Mini’s professional data that, while hard-core drinking is a major problem, there are also increasing percentages of non-drinkers or light drinkiers at the elite schools.”</p>
<p>I suspect this is true, though I actually don’t have data for it. On the whole, drinking at colleges and universities (don’t know about elite ones) is a little bit down from what it was 5 years ago. Some of it may have to do with some changes at high schools; others with some relatively effective measures taken by some colleges and universities (Oklahoma’s ban on all on-campus drinking; social norms marketing at a bunch of colleges and universities, etc.)</p>
<p>And some of it is what is happening in the culture generally speaking. Nationally (for everyone) per capita alcohol consumption is at a 20-year low; percentage of total abstainers is at a 20-year high. But at the same time, number of ER visits related to alcohol and alcohol-related deaths are also at an all-time high, as are cirrhosis and liver-cancer deaths. The suspicion is that fewer people are drinking, but those who do are more likely to drink heavily.</p>
<p>I’d have to agree that while my D’s college is not exactly known as a “party school,” there doesn’t seem to be any shortage of parties, and I’m sure there’s a good bit of drinking.</p>
<p>Okay, so the speculation about the rise in drinking age doesn’t explain the increase in binge drinking for the entire 18-21 year age group. What do you think does then? Just a bunch of over-indulged spoiled rich kids? I recall one reason we drank beer was that it was relatively cheap. My husband thinks it may be short attention spans of those kids, but that doesn’t explain why it’s mainly at certain elite, residential colleges. We live in a town with a branch of our state university (hardly an elite institution, and not rural either), and the level of drinking (as well as drinking w/driving) couldn’t possibly be higher anywhere. It is astounding how much and how often these kids drink. </p>
<p>One other thing I really don’t get about the drinking at our alma mater and other highly competitive schools is how students can drink during the week. Those kids should be working hard enough that they don’t have time to do that during the week.</p>