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By Olivia Winslow
December 3, 2006
Conor Hughes, a freshman at Stony Brook University, thought the Web-based alcohol education program he was required to take "would be boring."
Oksana Zhivotenko, another freshman on the campus, was sure it would be a "waste of time."
But both 18-year-olds said that they learned some things, particularly about how alcohol affects the body, during the three-hour, AlcoholEdu course that is required this year of all new students at Stony Brook.
"It explained things about your blood alcohol content. ... ," said Hughes, who hails from upstate Mahopac. "It says at one point, your judgment is impaired. At another point, your motor skills are impaired, at a higher point your entire body is shut down. This is information that will last you a lifetime and help you make the right choices," Hughes said.
As college administrators look for an edge in their battle against student drinking, they have at least one new tool: AlcoholEdu, an online alcohol prevention education course that two State University of New York campuses on Long Island - among others - have required their new students to take this fall.
They note links between college drinking and academic problems, car accidents, fighting, petty crime and alcoholism, among other impacts. According to government statistics, 1,700 college students between the ages of 18 and 24 die each year from alcohol-related injuries.
One part of an array
Stony Brook and SUNY Old Westbury are using grants from SUNY to add AlcoholEdu to an array of substance-abuse programs already in place.
"We want to educate students on what's appropriate activity and what's not appropriate," said Peter Baigent, Stony Brook's vice president for student affairs. He said AlcoholEdu is just one tool: There is "no one solution. ... You've always got to be able to have multiple strategies."
AlcoholEdu is required at Stony Brook for about 2,700 new students - freshmen and transfers. It is a three-hour course that has interactive elements, said Ellen Driscoll, the university's substance-abuse counselor. For instance, the program goes in different directions depending on whether the student is male or female, a heavy drinker or one who doesn't drink at all.
Although AlcoholEdu may not be in use at other Long Island campuses, college administrators use a broad assortment of education and counseling programs.
Janice Haynie, SUNY Old Westbury's vice president for student affairs, said it was clear from student surveys that many felt drinking was a part of college life. Even though Old Westbury is a "dry campus," Haynie said, "we found students do drink, and we found they think it's part of the college culture and college experience."
That's a perception that many college officials say they are trying to overcome.
A program at NY Tech
The New York Institute of Technology, whose main campus is in Old Westbury, also is a "dry campus"; alcohol is not permitted there, even among students who are over 21 and of legal age to drink. Programs include discussion about alcohol issues in orientation and the "College Success" seminar for freshmen. "We talk about the physiological aspects of what alcohol does to the body, in terms of impaired judgment. The long-term effects of alcohol and other drug use ... ," said Joseph Ford, vice president for student affairs.
The goal, he said, is "about helping our students think about these issues because we know they are dealing with peer pressure."
Adelphi University in Garden City has added two new alcohol education and prevention programs this year, thanks to a $200,000 grant from the Christopher D. Smithers Foundation, said Deborah Ramirez, director of Adelphi's student counseling center. In The Choices program, a staff member or peer counselor leads a group of students as they complete a 20-page pamphlet, writing down their "thoughts, feelings, experiences," Ramirez said.
A second program offers intervention. Called BASICS (for Brief Alcohol Screening and Intervention of College Students), it offers counseling for students with an alcohol problem or those found to be in violation of the university's no-alcohol policy.
Adelphi also uses, as part of the BASICS program, an interactive, online program called e-Chug. It queries students on how much they drink a day, how much money they spend on alcohol and where they get that money, Ramirez said. "The feedback we got is students are often horrified by the amount they drink when it's added up for them," Ramirez said.
Administrators at many colleges agreed that alcohol education is increasingly important because more students are drinking at earlier ages.
"We are in the process of educating them to make good choices," said Sandra Johnson, Hofstra University's vice president for student affairs. She added that Hofstra's programs are focused on helping students "to have a better awareness of alcohol's impact on their lives, their bodies, their health."
Alcohol education at Hofstra is included in a year-long program for first-year students called FOCUS, or Focusing on College and Understanding Social Issues. It's been in place for four years. Alcohol abuse is just one of the topics covered by FOCUS. For instance, a special guest may be brought in to talk about alcohol-related issues; or students may attend a theatrical performance, or sit in on a seminar or workshop in large or small groups in the dorms or student center.
No avoiding the subject
Haynie of Old Westbury has high hopes for AlcoholEdu, a requirement for the college's 350 freshmen and transfer students. Old Westbury and Stony Brook are among 15 campuses getting grants from SUNY.
SUNY has received a total $215,000 in grants since 2004 from the Century Council, The Michael Andretti Foundation and Jim Beam Brands Inc. focused on reducing high-risk drinking among college students, said James M. Schaefer, SUNY's director of alcohol and other drug prevention. SUNY has distributed $50,000 this year to campuses to cover half the cost of the AlcoholEdu course at campuses and another $50,000 for other programs, Schaefer said. Stony Brook received $18,500; Old Westbury got $5,000.
High-risk drinking among students is a "concern that almost all colleges face and we're no different," said Ed Engelbride, SUNY's assistant vice chancellor for university life.
Schaefer said the vastness of the 64-campus SUNY system makes student drinking difficult to generalize about. Forty three percent of college students nationwide acknowledge that they have gone on drinking binges. Binge drinking is often defined as five or more drinks on a single occasion. "At some [SUNY] campuses, it's as high as 45-46 percent, at others 38 percent," Schaefer said. "It depends on where you are."
Driscoll of Stony Brook said surveys of students show that binge drinking on campus "runs maybe 31 to 33 percent," lower than the average for many other colleges in the Northeast, which she said is about 45 percent. Still, she said, "We'd like to have zero percent binge drinking."
AlcoholEdu is a product of Outside the Classroom, a Needham, Mass.-based firm. More than 500 colleges are using AlcoholEdu, said Erika Tower, spokeswoman for Outside the Classroom.
AlcoholEdu has been studied by Andrew Wall as part of his doctoral dissertation in 2005 while at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He surveyed data of some 50,000 students. Wall said in an interview that when he compared students who had gone through the program to those who had not yet gone through it but would, "we found small, consistent findings that people who had gone through AlcoholEdu were less likely to have negative academic consequences. They reported less days of heavy alcohol consumption. They reported small differences in their positive expectations of alcohol."
Dispelling false notions
For instance, he said some people think alcohol makes them funnier or sexier. "But people who had gone through the program had less views like that."
Wall said that, while small, these changes are nonetheless important "because there are so few programs that show any changes in attitudes or behavior. What I'm saying," Wall continued, "is AlcoholEdu is not going to fix the problem, but it is part of the solution."
Stony Brook freshman Zhivotenko of Valley Stream was lukewarm about AlcoholEdu. She said she learned, for instance, that mixed drinks could contain more than one shot of alcohol, "so you have two or three shots in one drink." She also learned that four drinks in an hour would get a woman her size very drunk.
But Zhivotenko found that the program "was geared more towards people who were abusers of alcohol. I don't abuse those substances." She added, "There were three or four pages of survey questions. ... The program just asked too many questions about your personal life."
Hughes, the Stony Brook student from upstate Mahopac, was more enthusiastic. He said that, initially, he thought the course would be just another message that would say "do not drink. It's bad. Yada, yada, yada. But after having gone through it, I was extremely happy they made it mandatory." He added, "It was real-life plots they put together for you. ... The plot sets the characters up in such a way that it was realistic to you. That hit me more than if they were trying to send you a message."
The cost of college drinking
The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism draws on numerous studies and surveys to summarize the consequences of excessive and underage drinking:
DEATHS: 1,700 college students aged 18 to 24 die each year from alcohol-related unintentional injuries, including motor vehicle crashes.
ASSAULT: More than 696,000 students between the ages of 18 and 24 are assaulted by another student who has been drinking.
SEXUAL ABUSE: More than 97,000 students aged 18 to 24 are victims of alcohol-related sexual assault or date rape.
UNSAFE SEX: 400,000 students between 18 and 24 had unprotected sex and more than 100,000 students between 18 and 24 report having been too intoxicated to know if they consented to having sex.
ACADEMIC PROBLEMS: About 25 percent of college students report academic consequences of their drinking.
HEALTH PROBLEMS/SUICIDE ATTEMPTS: More than 150,000 students develop an alcohol-related health problem,and between 1.2 and 1.5 percent of students indicate that they tried to commit suicide within the past year due to drinking or drug use.
DRUNK DRIVING: 2.1 million students aged 18 to 24 drove under the influence of alcohol last year.
VANDALISM: About 11 per- cent of college student drinkers report they damaged property while under the influence of alcohol.
POLICE INVOLVEMENT: About 5 percent of 4-year college students have been involved with the police or campus security as a result of their drinking, and an estimated 110,000 students aged 18 to 24 are arrested for an alcohol-related violation such as public drunkenness or driving under the influence.
ALCOHOL ABUSE AND DEPENDENCE: 31 percent of college students met criteria for diagnosis of alcohol abuse and 6 percent for diagnosis of alcohol dependence in the past 12 months, according to questionnaire-based self-reports about their drinking.
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