Binge Drinking at College Campuses Persists, Study Says
Despite increased efforts to curb binge drinking on U.S. college campuses, the percentage of students who indulge in the practice remains nearly unchanged at 44.4%, a 2001 survey shows.
But college drinking patterns are changing, according to the study by researchers at Harvard University’s School of Public Health. For example, binge drinking has fallen among fraternity and sorority house residents but has risen on women’s college campuses.
“The drinking style on campus is still one of excess,” said Henry Wechsler, the principal investigator for the survey and director of college alcohol studies at Harvard. “It’s a stubborn, deeply entrenched behavior.”
The survey defined binge drinkers as men who had five or more drinks, and women who had four or more drinks, at least once in the two weeks before the survey. Frequent binge drinkers were those who consumed those amounts at least three times in the previous two weeks.
Wechsler, who has surveyed on-campus binge drinking four times since 1993, called on colleges, universities and communities to take aggressive steps to limit students’ access to alcohol. The efforts so far largely have involved educational programs or advertising designed to motivate students to change their drinking habits, he said.
“Decreasing the availability of alcohol to underage drinkers, limiting the heavy marketing and promotion of alcoholic beverages to college students . . . and raising the price of alcohol may be ways to impact this serious problem,” he said.
According to the new survey, binge drinking among students at women’s colleges has risen steadily from 24.5% in 1993 to 32.1% last year. Wechsler was at a loss to explain the increase, but noted that students at women’s schools still report lower rates of binge drinking than women at coed schools.
On the other hand, binge drinking declined among students living in fraternity and sorority houses from 83.4% in 1993 to 75.4% in 2001. Even so, Wechsler said, fraternity and sorority houses remain a bastion of binge drinking.
The survey showed other seemingly contradictory trends. For instance, the percentage of students who say they abstain from drinking has risen from 16.4% to 19.3% over the eight years that the survey has been conducted. At the same time, the share of students who are frequent binge drinkers has risen from 19.7% to 22.8%.
Overall, the percentage of college binge drinkers has hovered around 44% since 1993 despite reported declines in high school binge drinking and a rise in students living in so-called substance-free dormitories.
The survey, taken from February through April, was based on the replies of more than 10,000 full-time undergraduate students at 119 four-year U.S. colleges.
Although some college officials have questioned whether consuming four or five drinks should be considered binge drinking, Wechsler defended that standard. He said that level of consumption is linked to a wide variety of drinking-related problems, including involvement in vandalism and fighting, as well as drunken driving, unprotected sex and sexual assaults.
