Pulse
Consuming Culture
Risky drinking is on the rise on Minnesota college campuses.
A large green box with white letters that read “Drink & Dine” sits just below the masthead on the Minnesota Daily’s Web site. One click takes you to a guide to local watering holes and restaurants. One more and you get a list of the establishments’ daily drink specials. That the box is featured prominently on the home page of the University of Minnesota student newspaper’s online version is a reminder of alcohol’s prime place in campus culture.
Alcohol has long been part of college life, according to James Rothenberger, M.P.H., a public health
instructor at the university who has helped create a Web-based course for incoming freshmen on alcohol (see “A Shot of Education"). Rothenberger says if you looked at diaries of students attending Harvard when it was founded in the 1600s, you’d find plenty of references to alcohol. (One thing that has changed is what they consumed. “Probably more whiskey, less beer,” Rothenberger says.)
Data on college students’ drinking habits doesn’t go back quite that far. But two decades of research done by the Harvard School of Public Health and others have shown consistency in the overall levels of alcohol use.
Binge and Beyond
One of those consistent findings in Harvard’s College Alcohol Study, an ongoing survey of more than 14,000 students at 120 colleges in 40 states, is the proportion of students who say they’re binge drinkers. Since the 1990s, more than 40 percent say they had met the definition for binge drinking during the two weeks prior to completing the survey (five or more drinks in an episode for men and four drinks for women is considered a binge, according to the Harvard researchers).
Although the term “binge” has played well in the media, it has not been popular among many academics. “I strongly object to the use of that term for college drinking,” says J. Clark Laundergan, Ph.D., director for the Center for Addiction Studies at the University of Minnesota, Duluth campus.
“It’s stigmatizing for students,” he says, explaining that if a student is having one drink per hour in an attempt to drink responsibly, he can meet the binge drinker definition after five hours of partying.
Laundergan also says the term is imprecise. It doesn’t paint the full picture of college students’ drinking behavior such as the fact that there’s been a slight rise in the number of students who abstain from alcohol at the same time there’s been an increase in the amount of alcohol the heaviest drinkers consume.
Laundergan says a more useful measure for parsing drinking habits is the mean number of drinks consumed during the last drinking occasion. For about a third of students in the Duluth area, that number is quite a bit higher than five. At the University of Minnesota, Duluth campus, for example, it’s 7.31, which makes it look like a campus of binge drinkers. But when you consider that some students don’t drink at all, the numbers become more meaningful—and concerning. For students who do drink, the mean number of drinks is 8.15; and for males who drink, it’s a whopping 10.12.
A Shot of Education
Even the third of college freshmen who don’t drink at all need to know more than they do about alcohol, according to University of Minnesota public health instructor James Rothenberger, M.P.H., who with former student Tayne DeNeui has created an online course on alcohol and college life for freshmen on the Twin Cities, Duluth, and Crookston campuses. “In many ways we’re saying, ‘Look, for the next year, you’re going to be living in an alcohol-saturated environment whether you drink or not. Here are some skills that you can use to help shape that environment so that it is as conducive as possible to your work here.”
The course, a sort of survival manual for incoming freshmen, has three objectives: to reinforce abstinence (“We don’t want to make the assumption that everybody’s drinking,” Rothenberg says); give drinkers the skills and knowledge to be safe; and counter “some pretty horrible myths” (such as that passing out is a good thing because you no longer absorb alcohol, that drinking Red Bull can keep you from becoming intoxicated, or that college is all about drinking).
With humor, music, games, and video clips of real students telling their stories, the course delivers detailed information and nonmoralistic messages on such topics as what to do if someone passes out at a party, how to know when you’ve had too much, and what to do if you encounter drinking games. “There’s no old man giving a lecture, Rothenberger says. Students can work at their own pace and even download segments onto their MP3 players. Sample lessons are available on the Freshman Survival Skills Web site at www.collegelife.umn.edu.
Rothenberger says many young people view drinking, like driving, as a mark of maturity. And he’s frustrated that few are trained to handle alcohol. But that may be changing. The Alcohol and College Life course, which is offered but not required at the University of Minnesota, will be required of incoming students at Minnesota State University-Moorhead this fall. It also will be offered at Inver Hills Community College in Inver Grove Heights.—C.P.
|
Such heavy or high-risk drinking, whatever you call it, appears to be on the rise on other Minnesota campuses as well. Last February, Edward Ehlinger, M.D., M.S.P.H., director and chief health officer of Boynton Health Service at the University of Minnesota, stood before the university’s regents to report that high-risk episodic drinking among 18- to 24-year-olds (defined as five or more drinks on one occasion) on the Twin Cities campus had spiked from 39.6 percent of students in 2004 to 45.1 percent in 2005. It was the largest one-year jump Boynton had detected since it had been tracking rates.
At the time of his presentation, Ehlinger didn’t know whether the increase was an aberration or the beginning of a trend. Last month, the data on 2006 came in. “We went up in 2005 and stayed up in 2006,” Ehlinger says. “It’s not a one-year blip.”
Why that’s the case is unclear. But Ehlinger says the current crop of students seems willing to take more risks with alcohol. “Is it a different generation of students?” he asks. “I don’t think anybody has the answer.”
Laundergan, too, has observed a change in students’ attitudes. “High-risk drinking is far more acceptable,” he says, noting that for many, the objective of a night out is to get “totally wasted.” “The next morning they’re telling a friend about it. ‘I fell down the stairs,’ as if that were a wonderful thing,” he says.
The Fallout
The consequences of such alcohol intake, however, are anything but wonderful. Alcohol poisoning tops Ehlinger’s list of concerns for students. And there’s a laundry list of other negatives: Heavier drinkers get worse grades and fail more courses than others; they get into fights, and forget or regret what occurred while drinking; and they are involved in forced and unprotected sex more often. And Laundergan’s studies have shown they have higher rates of physical ailments such as mononucleosis, strep thoat, chronic fatigue, genital herpes, genital warts, hepatitis B or C, chlamydia, gonorrhea, and back pain than nondrinkers or below-the-mean drinkers.
Such consequences are often are what land college students in the offices of primary care physicians, according to Ehlinger, who says students regularly show up at Boynton Health Service with broken bones and lacerations that they incurred while drinking, or having been assaulted, or with alcohol-related mental health problems.
Ehlinger thinks physicians need to do more to address alcohol use in their college-aged patients. “I think what physicians need to know is that many of the things they see in their practice may be caused by or made worse by alcohol,” he says. “So if somebody comes in because of some injury or because of some STI, they should ask about alcohol use to see if the other conditions are related to the fact that they were drunk at the time. Then, they should counsel this age group about the risks of alcohol. They need to tell them that the more they drink, the more likely they are to have some untoward consequences,” he says.
In the meantime, Boynton Health Service will continue to lead the alcohol abuse-prevention activities on the Twin Cities campus, and the Center for Addiction Studies will continue to count the number of drinks college students are having in Duluth. And James Rothenberger and others will continue to educate the next crop of freshmen.
“We feel like we are rolling the big boulder up a hill,” Ehlinger says of such ongoing efforts. “We’re keeping it from falling down and from things really going to pot. But it’s difficult to roll up against a societal norm.”
—Carmen Peota