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By Amy Tiedge
October 2, 2006
First-year students at UD will soon be completing the second and last stage of AlcoholEdu, a required program instituted by the university to educate and inform incoming students about the effects of alcohol.
AlcoholEdu is an interactive, Web-based alcohol prevention program that puts students in real-life college situations, complete with surveys, videos and a final exam. The program, which takes about two hours to complete, was introduced to the UD community in 2005 for incoming first-year students.
Before entering the fall semester, incoming students are required to complete the first part of the course. Students take a survey about their own use and knowledge of alcohol, and then their choices are challenged and compared to the facts. Sixty days after the completion of part one, students are sent an e-mail asking them to complete part two, which is another survey to see how their knowledge and habits concerning alcohol have changed.
Incoming first-year students must complete AlcoholEdu in order to participate in the sophomore housing lottery.
Students are also given the opportunity to enter their name into a database, which is then given to non-drinking campus organizations like Club #6, Campus Ministry and Campus Activities Board.
"We want students to be healthier and safer in their choices, and also give options to those students who don’t drink," said Scott Markland, assistant dean of students for student development and proponent for bringing AlcoholEdu to UD.
According to Markland, rates of alcohol use generally remain steady for high school students. However, once students come to college, abstention rates plummet, heavy alcohol consumption rates increase and rates of serious, problematic drinking also go up. This "college effect" is running rampant at universities nationwide. UD’s implementation of AlcoholEdu is recognition of this reality and an attempt to combat it.
"Our aim isn’t to tell students that alcohol is evil, immoral, or even wrong, but it does force them to acknowledge that there are tradeoffs," Markland said. "Students are being challenged by the course to think about how they drink."
At the end of the program, students are given an opportunity to express their opinions about AlcoholEdu and if it changed their decision-making process.
"I learned more from the program than I had ever known about alcohol," said one anonymous respondent. "Not only does it teach the facts strictly about alcohol itself such as its nutrition facts and what it does to your body, it also shows what it can do to your life."
"I thought that this program was a great way for students to learn about what college life would be like," said another. "It provided examples that allowed one to mentally experience the situation before they were physically placed in it."
Not everyone was so enthusiastic.
"I thought it was too time consuming, and it really didn’t change the way I think about alcohol," said Elizabeth Glaser, a sophomore education major.
No matter what students' opinions are on AlcoholEdu, the fact remains that it is affecting behavior in the UD community. Since the implementation of the program, Thursday drinking and binge drinking rates are down, and an increasing number of students are participating in non-drinking organizations, according to Markland.
"This is more than just a course; it's a way to help students with similar interests meet and get involved," Markland said. "AlcoholEdu puts them in a college setting even before they get here, and also encourages them to plan for what they're going to do once school starts. This course is a primer to living on campus."
One student anonymously remarked about how AlcoholEdu is affecting UD's reputation.
"I encourage any student thinking about attending UD to realize that its party school reputation is one that pertains to the amount of fun people are having, not the amount of alcohol they are drinking," the student said.
For more information, visit the Web site for ADAPT, the Alcohol and Drug Abuse Prevention Team, at campus.udayton.edu/~adapt.
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