The wasted years: college presidents say that changing the culture of drinking on campus has been their gravest challenge. Whether they are up to the task is another question altogether.

If the basics of K-12 education are the three R's--reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetic--are the three V's of higher education vandalism, vomit, and violence? It's a horrendous image, but the fact of the matter is that these campus horrors are on the rise, and the statistics tell all:

* Alcohol abuse damages the bottom line at colleges and universities. At least 11 percent of students anonymously admit to having destroyed campus property white under the influence. Students hung over, or bruised in alcohol-related fights often turn to the campus healthcare system for help--another cost to the university. The total cost to higher ed is unknown, but assumed to be substantial, says Cheryl Presley, director and creator of the CORE Institute (www.siu.edu/departments/coreinst/public html), which studies alcohol use on campus and helps other institutions track student behavior. "Students can go to the hearth service and get treatment for a cut from a fight, but they might not admit or be asked if alcohol was involved," she explains. "So, it is hard to put a cost to it." The same is true for direct damage to facilities, and other alcohol-related incidents; connecting the dots to the bottom line is tough. But, says Presley, "It's an important focus for research that needs to be done."

* Alcohol abuse hurts academics, according to the Center for College Health and Safety (www2.edc.org/cchs). At least 60 percent of students report trouble steeping or studying because of the distraction caused by on-campus partying.

* More than 500,000 college students are assaulted each year by someone who has been drinking, according to the Center for College Health and Safety (www2.edc.org/cchs). This number is three times greater than the number of all students enrolled in the University of Texas system.

* An additional 70,000 college students report being the victims of alcohol-related sexual assaults, sometimes on campus and sometimes off. In fact, alcohol use figures into most rapes and sexual violence incidents, according to the widely quoted study, Trends in College Binge Drinking (College Alcohol Study division of the Harvard School of Public Health, 2002; www.hsph.harvard.edu/cas/Documents/trends).

* Nearly 75 percent of rape victims on campus say they were intoxicated at the time of the attack, according to this same study. "Women--sometimes too weak to speak, sometimes unconscious-are being forced to have sex against their wilt," says Henry Wechsler, director of the College Alcohol Study.

* More than 400,000 students report having unprotected sex after drinking, thus increasing their chances for unplanned pregnancies and acquiring HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases.

* An estimated 1,400 American college students die of alcohol-related deaths every year. That total is equivalent to the student body of any number of private colleges.

* Alcohol a depressant, probably figures into an incalculable number of student suicides and is known to play a role in chronic depression.

* Eighty percent of college alcohol-related fatalities are the result of traffic accidents, according to the CCHS. Other students die from alcohol poisoning or fatal on-campus accidents such as falls out of windows.

Robert Schmalz was just one such fatality last year. The 22-year-old frat member of Phi Kappa Tau was a student at Bradley University (IL) when he celebrated the end of the Greek system's fall rush by hour-upon-hour drinking on a Saturday. By 7 a.m. Sunday, Schmalz had stopped breathing. Sadly, he had been involved in two other alcohol-related incidents before his death, including a DWI arrest. And ironically, he died only a few days before Bradley administrators were honored in Washington, DC, by the Inter-Association Task Force on Alcohol and Other Substance Abuse Issues (www.iatf.org). The Bradley honorees accepted $5,000 on behalf of the school, for their effective alcohol and drug abuse prevention program. Alan Galsky, Bradley's associate provost for Student Affairs, later remarked that, "no school, regardless of the level and quality of alcohol education programs, is immune to these things happening."

He has a point. Trends in College Binge Drinking claims that an alarming 44 percent of college students admit to binge drinking--that is, imbibing five or more drinks in one sitting. And while these figures may only be close to the truth (taking into account those students who do not wish to reveal the extent of their drinking to surveyors) it indicates that, conservatively speaking, almost half of U.S. college students are drinking to get drunk. The percentage has remained unchanged since the study launched in 1993.

In the past, generations of adults have greeted the alcohol-related indiscretions of youth with winks, seeing heavy drinking as a rite of passage for America's college students. Even the authors whose works are studied in introductory American literature classes--Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Dorothy Parker--relate overindulgence in alcohol to youthful sophistication. Add to these literary images the "reality TV" coverage of out-of-control drinking and partying on shows such as MTV's Spring Break, and it would seem futile to even try to address the problem of widespread alcohol abuse on campus. But college administrators must try, because as Wechsler simply puts it, "Drinking at these levels has consequences."

The Power of the President

Faced with such harsh realities, it isn't surprising that some presidents define alcohol abuse as the most serious problem on campus.

Susan Resneck Pierce, who retired from the presidency of the University of Puget Sound (WA) just last year, is one campus leader who moved the alcohol abuse issue to the very top her list. Four years before her retirement, she had received a call from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (www.niaaa.nih.gov), asking that she represent liberal arts colleges as part of a larger task force on college drinking.

"My first thought was to just say no," she says. "I didn't think that alcohol was a good association with the University of Puget Sound." Pierce's reaction wasn't uncommon; many presidents hesitate to speak of problem for fear that it will reflect badly on their own institution. But Pierce says she changed her mind when she started to move her thinking beyond the public relations ramifications. Then she could see the effort as an ethical responsibility. She remembers thinking, "If it could help one student, it was worth doing."

Pierce recalls that after returning from one NIAAA meeting, she learned that a student on her campus was cited for creating a public disturbance. His defense was to say that he and his friends were just acting like college students--a denial of the seriousness of the situation. Soon, Pierce says, she came to see that students and administrators were having trouble admitting there was a problem. That's when she understood it was imperative the message about combating alcohol abuse on campus come from the president's office.

"Presidential leadership is crucial to set plans in motion and support the actions needed to reverse the culture of drinking on campus," she insists. After all, she asks, if the president isn't the one carrying the message, how will the other administrators or students buy in?

In 2000, to reduce high-risk drinking, Pierce asked other administrators and local officials to form a Campus Community Partnership at the university. The partnership initiated a number of efforts, including creating more late-night, alcohol-free events, outreach to local bars to reduce alcohol abuse, and starting a social norms marketing campaign to tell students that they don't have to drink to have a good time (see "Selling the Social Norm," page 32). Pierce also hired Charee Boulter, a full-time psychologist and substance-abuse prevention program coordinator, to work out of the counseling center and dedicate her time solely to alcohol and drug abuse prevention.

Four years later, even though the partnership is not meeting on a regular basis, its efforts have become part of campus life. Puget Sound's Midnight Breakfast, which offers free food to its university students, is held at least twice per semester and draws about 500 students. Other student dubs and groups are encouraged to hold alcohol-free events with the promise that the university will provide the snacks and soda for such events: A recent alcohol-free salsa dance party held by Puget Sound's Latino/Latina student club was a modest success, drawing 50 students. And eight Local bars have agreed to participate in the university's Designated Driver Card Program. Students who carry the cards have agreed to not drive drunk, and, in turn, they receive free food or discounts on food and soda at Local student bars.

Have the actions had an effect? Boulter sees some hopeful signs. Statistics gathered through CORE (Puget Sound is one of the schools measured by the CORE Institute) show that the school's driving-after-drinking rates have decreased from 24 percent to 17.6 percent. However, such behavior changes are categorized as "harm reduction," which refers to behaviors people are willing to modify to make a dangerous behavior less risky. The school's stats relating to students who have stopped binge drinking are not as positive: The binge-drinking rate has held steady, says Boulter, with 35 percent of students admitting to such behavior.

Turning Around the Number One Party School

Almost a decade ago, Robert Carothers, president of the University of Rhode Island, embarked on a mission to change the campus culture there. His decision came not long after the Princeton Review had named URI the number one party school in the nation. In fact, URI won the honor three years running, starting in 1993. By its third year of the dubious distinction, even the students had taken to dubbing URI as "UR high."

The university's beautiful Location only helped to create a party atmosphere. URI is located in Narragansett, a town that is only a 15-minute drive from the Newport, the tony tourist destination known as the millionaires' playground of the East Coast--and in more recent years, as a party town for college kids. With flat houses sprinkled about picturesque Narragansett Bay, and students cramming the streets of Newport on any given weekend, it is hard to fight the image that going to school at URI is one long vacation.

"We had to change," says Carothers, who has been the university's president for 13 years. URI's party-school reputation was impacting the type of student applying, he explains. Then, too, there were URI graduations, which had become known for being bacchanal celebrations complete with students passing bottles while listening to the commencement address. "We had become a joke," Carothers remembers, adding that in 1992, URI decided to place construction-size dumpsters along the route to commencement, to ensure the students gave up the booze before entering. "We had police officers patting everyone down," he recalls. Three dumpsters were filled with bottles that year.

Today, says Carothers, nobody totes alcohol coming in to graduation. "We had to change the expectation about that, and we had to live through four or five years of doing things differently before those who knew about the old way of doing things were gone."

But Carothers' plans for URI had addressed much more than the graduation ceremony; he, along with a select group, formed an Alcohol Team that created new policies and programs. By the mid-1990s, URI was a dry campus, prohibiting alcohol at all events except homecoming--and that included not only frat parties, but even trustee gatherings at the president's house. Carothers stresses that he asks nothing more of the students than he asks of the adults; students easily spot hypocrisy, he explains. He does concede that students of legal drinking age sometimes have alcohol in their rooms. "We don't kick dorm doors down," he says. But students 21 and over are expected to confine alcohol use to their rooms and are held accountable for any disorderly public conduct.

Pierce and others note, though, that there is now counter-thinking to the dry campus policy. Such restrictions can drive students off campus, thus increasing the chance of traffic accidents and DWI arrests.

Yet, Carothers makes no apologies for the tough stance, which also includes a three-strikes-you're-out approach that bounces students out of school for alcohol use that violates URI's rules. And much to diehard alum dismay, Carothers made 1999's homecoming the first dry homecoming in campus history. Though attendance dropped from 20,000 to 5,000 that year, so have the number of alcohol-related medical emergencies since, says the university's president. Where once an average of 14 people were rushed to the hospital in one weekend, there have been no alcohol-related emergencies at homecoming for the past two years.

Overall, the number of alcohol-related incidents is down at URI and only 10 percent of students cited for violations are cited a second time. Carothers tikes to think that a different kind of student is now considering URI--evidenced by the fact that SAT scores for incoming freshmen have risen by an average of 200 points. The retention rate is climbing, too, he says--from 76 to 82 percent for incoming freshmen.

Carothers knows, though, that the changes have not made him the most popular man in town. URI, sandwiched in its tourist environs, is surrounded by bars and clubs that count on student patrons. His requests that the local bar owners become more responsible have been only grudgingly acknowledged. URI trustees have even threatened his job, believing he is too tough: Carothers sparked their ire in 1996 when he canceled a football game with the University of Connecticut after finding out that URI football players were involved in an alcohol-related fight with fraternity members. In the end, the cancellation cost URI $20,000 in penalty fees, and URI had to agree that the next two games would be prayed at UConn, further hurting related food, beverage, and retail sales for the university.

As it stands, under Carothers' watch, eight fraternities have left campus, but they were the organizations most identified as drinking clubs, he says. These fraternities "trash the houses, can't pay the bills, and then can't attract responsible students to live there," says Carothers. When alumni accuse him of beating all the fun out of college Life, Carothers invites them back to campus to see the blighted houses firsthand. "We take a walking tour," says Carothers, "and that ends that."

As for the honor of being Princeton Review's number one party school, in the 2004 edition, URI didn't even break the top 20. And the newfound pride is not only about the primary goat of making student the safer for URI students, says Carothers. "In 30-some years of fundraising, I teamed that people don't give to organizations that need money, they give to organizations they are proud of."

This spring, Carothers was one of two presidents to win the CCHS Presidents Leadership Group Award for instituting effective alcohol policies. Just weeks after claiming the distinction, URI announced a new $100 million capital campaign to boost its endowment, with real hopes of surpassing the $68 million raised during the Last campaign herd in the mid-1990s. (To find out more about the Presidents Leadership Group Award, head to www.presidentsleadershipaward.org.)

Getting Parents Involved

The other president to share the leadership honors with Carothers was David Roselle, president of the University of Delaware. His multiple strategies for combating alcohol abuse on campus included implementing the first parental notification policy in the early 1990s, alerting parents when their children's alcohol abuse resulted in illegal activities. At the time, the Federal Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) was not yet amended to allow for such action.

"In my opinion, many presidents hid behind it," he says. But Roselle saw parents as key in stopping alcohol abuse. "Parents have the checkbook, car keys, and the inheritance," he says. Getting them involved brings pressure to bear on the student, he explains, and keeps a president from ever having to tell a parent, "We knew there was a problem but we didn't tell you."

By 1995, FERPA was amended to allow for parental notification. Roselle says the policy is now at the "tipping point"--more than half of U.S. universities have such a policy on the books.

Roselle also curbed on-campus drinking by cutting down on tailgate parties. Curbing the parking-lot partying "sounds Like a grim business, but it actually is kind of fun," he says. The "Get Your Tail to the Gate" program requires UD football fans to be in the stadium by kickoff. "When the game starts, the parking tots are quiet."

And like Carothers, Roselle came down hard on the Greek system. "Those [fraternities and sororities] whose members get poor grades are not allowed to take on new members," he says.

Roselle's actions have influenced a host of other schools, including the University of California at Santa Barbara, which instituted a parental notification policy in late 2002. Like many other schools, UCSB has had a high percentage of binge-drinking students, and to complicate matters, the university is located next to Isla Vista, where many of its students live off campus and enjoy the freedom to party away from the watchful eye of the administration. Understandably, the residents of Isla Vista are not happy about the noise and chaos. But because California has its own set of student privacy laws, UCSB is not able to implement a standard parental notification policy. So, the university put into place a twist on parental notification, explains Deborah Fleming, associate dean of students. Instead of reporting on-campus incidents, staffers comb the Isla Vista police reports to learn of incidents where students were picked up for drunkenness or vandalism. In 2002, the staff sent 327 sets of letters to parents. (Depending upon the circumstances, students were asked to attend education seminars or counseling.) According to Fleming, many parents called to thank UCSB for the information. And metrics gathered between fall 2001 and fall 2002 show that UCSB alcohol-related arrests were down 45 percent. About 10 percent of students whose parents were notified claim they have made measurable behavioral changes.

As for on-campus incidents, they do not go unnoted, even though the parental notification policy cannot be used to address them, says Fleming. And UCSB has a no-drinking policy for underage students; those in violation are referred to campus alcohol education classes or asked to perform community service. Repeat offenders are required to give up their placement in an on-campus residence.

The Panacea Eludes

There are many measures college and university administrators can take to try to control and contain the damage to students (and by extension, to IHEs themselves), caused by the enormous problem of alcohol abuse on campus. To date, a panacea eludes U.S. campuses, but that doesn't keep determined administrators from trying new ideas and new combinations of solutions. The extent to which the scourge erodes campus life--and the world of academia--is just now being realized. Only surprising are the still-large numbers of campus leaders who continue to address (or not address) the problem by simply waiting and hoping that it will go away.

RELATED ARTICLE: Selling the social norm.

There's a new kind of student message on campus that can be summed up as, "Not everybody's doing it."

Such messages--often transmitted via posters (such as the ones pictured, right), brochures, and Web sites--are called "social norms" campaigns, and they are designed to reduce peer pressure to drink. The messages assure students that, on average, more than half of U.S. college and university students do not binge drink, nor need to in order to have a good time. According to data collected by researchers at Hobart and William Smith Colleges (NY), most students actually overestimate how frequently and how much other students are drinking; then, in order to fit in, they increase their own risk by drinking more.

Currently, about half of U.S. colleges and universities are believed to have social norms programs (up from 20 percent in 1999), says Henry Wechsler, director of the College Alcohol Study at the Harvard School of Public Health (www.hsph.harvard.edu). Northern Illinois University was first to launch a social norms campaign in 1989. By 2000, large schools such as Pennsylvania State University and small schools like the University of Puget Sound (WA) were waging social norms campaigns in student newspapers, and via other print media. Three years ago, Georgetown University (DC) launched a Friends Initiative, which did everything from establishing a center and Web site (www.redsquare.georgetown.edu), to bringing a "Greasy Food Truck" program to campus to distribute low-cost or free food to students on Friday and Saturday nights. Simultaneously, a social norms print campaign was launched to spread the word about the new offerings on campus, and to change students' perceptions about needing to drink to have a good time. Flyers were even posted on lavatory doors to reach a captive audience.

The question is, are such efforts worth it?

Wechsler says no. According to a report (www.hsph.harvard.edu/cas/Documents/ social norms) released through the Harvard School of Public Health in January 2004 (which studied students' exposure to such social norms marketing messages and their drinking behavior at 37 colleges employing the campaigns, and at 61 that did not), there is no evidence of a decline in drinking on campuses that employ social norms marketing techniques. In fact, Wechsler has gone on record to say that drinking has actually increased at some of the schools utilizing social norms techniques. He adds that many social norms programs have received funding from the U.S. Department of Education and from the alcohol industry (notably, Anheuser-Busch). But social norms marketing doesn't send a strong enough message, he maintains. Students might intellectually understand more of the risks, but they aren't being motivated to change behavior.

Yet, other sources defend the effectiveness of social norms marketing, in specific instances. According to statistics released by the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse and the Journal of Studies on Alcohol, such campaigns are credited with reducing "high-risk" drinking by 32 percent at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and by 66 percent at the University of Virginia. (More information about these studies can be found at www.socialnorms.org.)

And while the level of binge-drinking behavior has held steady at 44 percent nationwide for the past decade, schools such as the University of Puget Sound report that the percentage of students who perceive drinking five or more drinks in one sitting as "risky behavior" has climbed to 61.5 percent in 2003, from 45.1 percent two years earlier, in 2001.

Will such changed perceptions lead to changed behavior? The answer is anyone's guess. Wechsler advocates that schools work on town/gown relationships, convincing local bars to nix two-for-one specials and ladies nights where females (and female students) can drink for low or even no cost. Because preliminary research does indeed indicate that students are influenced by the cost factor, making it more expensive to drink just might be the answer, says Wechsler, adding, "There is something wrong when it costs more to go to a movie than it does to get drunk."

Housing Students in Recovery

Those who sympathize with conscientious college students subjected to the cacophony of partying dormmates might want to consider what it must feel like to be young and in substance abuse recovery while living on campus. The 18-year-old college student who arrives at college already in recovery is faced with temptation at every turn. What's more, such students often live in isolation among legions of others who have no comprehension of the need to abstain from drugs and alcohol. Adding to the complexity of such a situation is the fact that the college-age individual in recovery is usually a good 10 years younger than peers in 12-step recovery programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous, notes Lisa Laitman, director of Alcohol Assistance and Other Drug Programs at Rutgers University (NJ). Such an age gap makes it hard for the young person in recovery to find sober friends who understand, in a practical way, the realities of living on campus.

The need for more support on campus is what spurs Laitman's work. She runs a special project at Rutgers that offers campus housing for students in recovery. "You don't have to miss the party scene if you have your own scene," she explains. Granted, there is only room for a modest number of students: 21. Still, Rutgers gets credit for being the first university to officially offer housing to students in 12-step programs. The housing program was introduced several years ago and is financed, in part, by the university's Health Services department. State funds and room-and-board fees also support the program. Laitman's office also offers counseling and support to a larger number of commuter students and those who attend 12-step programs but who live in other student housing.

Today, Rutgers is one of a meager four known universities in the U.S. offering such housing for young people trying to live clean and sober. Augsburg College (MN), Dana College (NE), and Texas Tech University also offer housing to recovering students. Laitman notes, though, that there is growing understanding about this unique problem. These schools and more than 35 others--including some high schools--formed the Association of Recovery Schools (www.recoveryschools.org) two years ago, to foster the movement. And earlier this year, Texas Tech announced that it received a $250,000 federal grant to create a national model of its program. Recovery housing is not the only groundbreaking in this area, however. Starting this fall, the University of Texas at Austin is scheduled to open a Center for Students in Recovery, which will offer the academic course, "Complete Recovery 101."

To Help End Alcohol and Other Substance Abuse on Your Campus, Find Out More

www.niaaa.nih.gov--National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) is part of the National Institutes of Health.

www.collegedrinkinqprevention.gov--features numerous studies on alcohol abuse on campus, including "A Call to Action: Changing the Culture of Drinking at U.S. Colleges" (www.collegedrinkingprevention.gov/Reports/TaskForce/TaskForce TOC.aspx), by the Task Force of the National Advisory Council on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

Higher Education Center for Alcohol and Other Drug Prevention, is part of the U.S. Department of Education (www.edc.org/hec).

Dying to Drink: Confronting Binge Drinking on Campuses, by Henry Wechsler and Bernice Wuethrich (Rodale Books, 2002), is available through the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges (www.agb.org).

www.alcoholpolicysolutions.net is a Web site of the American Medical Association.

AlcoholEdu is the flagship product of Outside the Classroom (www.outsidetheclassroom.com), which provides confidential surveys and preventive alcohol abuse education for students.

CORE Institute offers drug and alcohol surveys of colleges and universities (wvwv.siu.edu/departments/coreinst/public html).