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Boston, Mass. - February 20, 2003 - More than half the college students who took AlcoholEdu, an innovative online alcohol prevention course from Outside The Classroom, said in a follow-up survey they are considering changing their drinking behavior because of what they learned. Fifty-three percent of the 21,000 students who completed survey questionnaires both before and after taking the course in the fall of 2002 gave answers ranging from "some" to "yes, a lot will change," to the question: "Do you think anything in AlcoholEdu will change the way you use alcohol?"
AlcoholEdu is a cornerstone of many colleges' comprehensive alcohol prevention programs and is currently being used on more than 300 campuses nationwide to confront the "culture of drinking" in higher education, including the alarming increase in binge drinking by underage students in recent years. Outside The Classroom will begin announcing aggregate results of its AlcoholEdu surveys twice a year. The preliminary results from the survey questionnaires include answers to dozens of questions ranging from students' newly acquired understanding of technical information, such as absorption rates of alcohol in the body and blood alcohol content, to their levels of interest in and engagement with the online course material.
Dr. Henry Wechsler, director of the Harvard School of Public Health College Alcohol Studies Program and author of the 2002 book Dying to Drink:Confronting Binge Drinking on College Campuses, has long called on colleges and universities, communities, parents, and students to take systematic action against high-risk drinking and to use more effective prevention tools and strategies. "What I like about AlcoholEdu is that it goes beyond traditional alcohol awareness -- this prevention program shows students how they are manipulated by alcohol advertising, and engages them in questioning their expectations about the effects of drinking," Wechsler said.
Colleges Get Serious About Binge Drinking
"With colleges struggling to turn the tide of dangerous drinking, administrators are under more pressure than ever before to provide measurable results documenting the efficacy of their programs," said Kevin Kruger, Associate Executive Director of the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (NASPA). "We've never before seen the quantity and quality of data on alcohol prevention that Outside The Classroom is generating from the tens of thousands of students taking the AlcoholEdu course. It's a wealth of information that is setting a standard for the kind of measurement and documentation that colleges must get from their comprehensive prevention programs."
Other results from the AlcoholEdu survey indicate that the course changes students' opinions about alcohol, that it increases their awareness and understanding of key, science-based facts about alcohol's effect on them, and that they are comfortable getting this information from an interactive, Web-based course:
- After taking AlcoholEdu, the proportion of students who said "drinking is never a good thing to do" doubled.
- More than 75 percent said they knew more about blood alcohol content after taking the course.
- Four out of ten students educated by AlcoholEdu about blood alcohol content said they had previously underestimated their levels of intoxication when they had been drinking.
- 84 percent felt AlcoholEdu was helpful, and 25 percent found it "very" helpful.
- 90 percent said they paid attention, and 66 percent found it "interesting."
- After they completed the course, the proportion of students who were "enthusiastic" about taking it tripled.
Online Prevention is a Cornerstone of Comprehensive Programs
"The online, interactive medium is the most powerful new weapon colleges have in their effort to attack the high-risk drinking problem not only at the student level, but also at the population level of their institutions," said Brandon Busteed, founder and CEO of Outside The Classroom. "When half the students who take AlcoholEdu indicate an intent to change their individual behavior, you can bet that the colleges requiring their entire school populations to take the course will see a cumulative and positive institutional shift away from an alcohol-centric campus culture. That's what population-level prevention is all about."
Busteed said the size of the survey is significant because no other alcohol prevention program has provided as much data from such a broad population of students. And because the survey is given to each student before and after completion of the course, Outside The Classroom's customers will benefit from comparison of their own students' responses with a total survey population that will continue to grow. "Given the results, we expect to see a dramatic increase in the number of schools mandating the course for their freshmen classes in the coming year," Busteed said.
AlcoholEdu was developed to attack the problem of student alcohol abuse. It is an online course that students take in the privacy of their rooms. Presenting valuable information in a non-opinionated format about the medical and social effects of drinking, the course empowers students to make more informed decisions. The program bases its instruction on interdisciplinary applications of alcohol to brain science, sociology, history and mathematics. More than half of the 20 top-ranked universities in the annual U.S. News & World Report list of leading American colleges have signed on to deliver AlcoholEdu to their students, including Dartmouth, Northwestern, Duke, Tufts, Villanova and the University of Connecticut.
1,400 Deaths, 500,000 Injuries Related to Alcohol
The problem of binge drinking on campus has reached crisis proportions. In "A Call to Action: Changing the Culture of Drinking at U.S. Colleges," the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) notes the staggering toll alcohol takes. The survey cites 1,400 alcohol-related deaths, 500,000 alcohol-related injuries, 70,000 alcohol-related sexual assaults, 2.1 million incidences of drunk driving, and 159,000 first-year student dropouts due to alcohol and drugs every year.
The results from the 27,900 students who completed the AlcoholEdu pre-test questionnaire dramatically illustrate many of the problems highlighted in the NIAAA report, especially those affecting college students' academic performance:
- 78 percent indicated they consumed an average of 9.72 drinks per week during the previous two weeks. That's enough to register discernible blood alcohol content levels for an average of more than 18 hours per week per student - more than the roughly 15 hours per week spent in class by most college students.
- 23.7 percent said that at least once in the previous two weeks they had attended a class with a hangover from drinking too much the night before.
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