College freshmen find more campus drinking than they expect
MINOT, N.D. — North Dakota college freshmen believe frequent student drinking is common, but they underestimate how pervasive it is, says a state official who is exploring ways to combat the problem.
Binge drinking among young people often starts long before they set foot on a college campus, said Karin Walton, director of the North Dakota Higher Education Consortium for Substance Abuse Prevention. She is based at the University of North Dakota.
Walton said Thursday she believes that fighting the problem should begin with youngsters as young as 12. Focusing on college campuses as a root of the binge-drinking problem amounts to “throwing campus solutions at a community issue,” she said.
Walton conducted a survey of freshmen entering North Dakota’s public college campuses in the fall of 2004. The respondents believed that 47 percent of college students engaged in binge drinking, which was defined as having at least five drinks in one sitting within the past two weeks.
The actual rate among North Dakota college students is almost 55 percent, Walton said.
Patricia Olson, of Harvey, who is the board’s student member, said she believes the binge-drinking problem “is coming from junior high and high school,” and does not have its origins on campus. Olson is a senior majoring in finance at the University of North Dakota.
When she was a high school freshman, “I had lots of friends that were going out and getting drunk during the week and on weekends,” Olson said. “I think we need to stop (binge drinking) in the beginning stages.”
Walton said her study sought to find whether campus binge drinking rates could be reduced by telling students it did not occur as frequently as they believed it did.
If it is more common to avoid binge drinking than to indulge in it, students can be told it is normal to shun heavy drinking, and that may help to cut down instances of it, Walton said.
However, Walton’s survey discovered freshmen were underestimating the frequency of binge drinking among students. Therefore, the argument that binge drinking is abnormal will not be effective, she said.
Walton surveyed 1,860 freshmen who were beginning college in the fall of 2004. She said 41 percent of them reported binge drinking, while 28 percent said they did not drink at all in high school.
One of her objectives was to “determine if students bring the drinking to campus, or learn to drink after they arrive on campus,” she said. “Freshmen start drinking before college ... in their home communities.”