Alcohol: an Issue to Bring About

At the start of a typical fall semester, the media tends to focus on the amount of alcohol college students consume. While this fall was no exception, the Fall 2010 semester uniquely seems to have spawned extended focus from colleges of all sizes and locations who report their campus alcohol-related incidents have increased this year.

Is there truly an increase? We wouldn’t know for sure unless we took an official survey of campuses, or unless we compared the number of media stories from this fall to prior semesters. Official scientific studies aside, there is no doubt that alcohol remains the number one abused drug on college campuses. It’s easy to forget that alcohol is a drug, and for many traditional aged students, it is an illegal drug to possess or consume.

Many students perceive their peers to be drinking alcohol at a much higher rate than what’s actually reported. We know this based on over a decade of research and preventative programming that supports the theory that, once students know how much their peers are actually drinking, their rates of drinking decrease to better match the reported norm. Thus, their new perception becomes reality.

So why does it seem that every fall the media is able to report higher-than-normal drinking rates? Is it because students go home for the summer and forget what the norm is on their campus or in their organizations? Is it the large influx of freshmen who haven’t yet been exposed to the norm, therefore feeling the need to overcompensate and match the perception of the partying college student? Is there a group or organization that feels the need to start the semester off with a bang and ends up becoming a media circus? Or is it truly a trend that we’re seeing—the trend that starts with Fall 2010, where students are actually drinking more, or experiencing increased negative consequences compared to prior years? Only time will tell, but if perception is reality, the media has unfortunately characterized this...