Better Health Services Needed for College Students, U.S. Says
The government, in its first nationwide survey of college students, said that drunk driving, marijuana use and other bad habits are serious enough to warrant better campus health programs.
“Society seems to think that college students are an elite class that don’t need to be touched by health services, but it’s clear that they do,” Laura Kann, a researcher at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Friday.
The survey of 4,609 students at 136 universities found that 27% said they drove after drinking, 31% smoked cigarettes regularly and almost half had tried marijuana.
About 35% of students said they binged when they drank alcohol. Less than one-third said they used a condom the last time they had sex and 13.1% said they had been raped, the CDC said.
Results of the survey, conducted in 1995, were being published in this month’s issue of the Journal of American College Health.
Campus health programs often deal only with cuts and scrapes, said Lloyd Kolbe, director of the CDC’s division of adolescent and school health.
They can be designed better to help students cut down their destructive habits, he said.
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