<p>See prior thread about related topic:
<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-life/845978-where-drinking-non-issue.html?highlight=mamaroneck[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-life/845978-where-drinking-non-issue.html?highlight=mamaroneck</a></p>
<p>Brigham Young University</p>
<p>Another option is selecting “substance free” housing. Not all schools offer this, but it can be a nice way to be able to escape out of control party scenes. The kids aren’t committing to not drinking at all, just not bringing the party into their living areas. We visited the dorms on a Friday night and I can attest to the fact that the halls were pretty quiet.</p>
<p>You guys are looking at this question in a somewhat less than useful way. There is drinking at almost all colleges. There are HUGE differences in the amount and intensity of drinking at various schools. The issue is not whether there is partying and drinking, but rather, is there so much drinking and resulting drunken behavior that the college is disruptive for normal non-drinking or light-drinking or moderate-drinking college students.</p>
<p>Anecdotal stories are nice, but they don’t tell you much. What you need is statistical data. Fortunately, there is just such data because all colleges use survey instruments that include the “binge drinking question”. Binge drinking is defined as five or more drinks in one sitting (or sometimes 4 for females). The question is, “have you consumed five or more drinks on one occasion in the last two weeks?”</p>
<p>The national average is around 44%. You can assume that a college with below average percentages (say below 35%) will seem like a relatively sober campus. Those above average (say above 50%) will feel like drunk tanks and will inflict significant collateral damage on sober students. The real disruption comes from the frequent binge drinkers (averaging more than once a week). Their numbers tend to run about half of the overall binge drinking rate.</p>
<p>Pomona is a below average binge drinking school. Most West Coast schools tend towards the low end. Schools with a lot of diversity or a lot of community service tend low. Women’s schools tend low. Very academic oriented schools tend low. Male, sports oriented, rural, northeast tend very high. The deans are required to share this data with you if you ask.</p>
<p>In the LAC world, all of the women’s colleges and former women’s colleges tend low to moderate. Swarthmore tends low (which is a bit of contradiction since the school makes no particular effort to ban alcohol and its widely available – just goes to show that it’s campus culture related). The rural NESCAC schools tend high.</p>
<p>Another statistical measure is the number of alcohol poisoining transports to the emergency room in a year. One or two, OK. College kids make mistakes, but when you start getting 10, 20, 50, or 60 in a year or when you’ve got high schoolers being transported during recruiting visits, you’ve got serious problems.</p>
<p>Sometimes this stuff can be unearthed from google searches on the campus sites and student newspaper sites. Google phrases like “binge drinking” and “alcohol poisoning”. If you find newspaper articles, especially about administration committees being formed or consultants being hired, there are probably good reasons.</p>
<p>Another consideration is the size of the school. A large university may have a party reputation but there can be plenty of students around who don’t party. At a school of 40,000 even if 10,000 party that still leaves 30,000 who don’t while the partiers make the news. A large school will have many subcultures and plenty of likeminded people in divergent, even conflicting, lifestyles.</p>
<p>interesteddad: Do you find these stats reliable? I certainly wouldn’t consider student reported data on (oftentimes illegal) activities valid. I would argue that anecdotal evidence paints a picture that is no more or less clear than that painted by a student questionnaire asking them to self report their drinking habits.</p>
<p>I am not sure I trust all schools to accurately report the slanted info they get from their students either. Just saying that when people have a vested interest in the outcome of a “study” that interest alone is often enough to color the data interpretation and therefore the final results.</p>
<p>I do agree that if you can find it, information on alcohol poisoning and alcohol related 911 calls per capita would be a good indicator of trends. However, as a parent who has helped/is helping kids in the college search. The most valuable information to me continues to be the anecdotes offered by people who have been there. If multiple students and parents at renowned party schools like ASU or Chico State can tell me that there are well attended alcohol free saturday activities, that is what is important to me.</p>
<p>Bottom line partying is ubiquitous on most college campuses. It is the availability and popularity of sober activities that my daughters were looking for.</p>
<p>^Hi historymom! SMU tour scheduled for sons spring break.</p>
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<p>True there is error in self-report, but that error is across schools. Its either constant (e.g. highly correlated with the true binge drinking rate), or the self-reporting bias varies by school. In the first case, it yields extremely meaningful data. In the second case, it is still meaningful data, just a somewhat different kind. If you expect reporting error/bias to be higher at one school than another, that also tells you something, doesn’t it, about the schools? </p>
<p>I would argue that a school culture where drinking is more accepted (and maybe even a source of pride), you’d have higher reports of binge drinking (even if objective the rate is not higher), because students are less concerned about reporting it and may even be bragging about it.</p>
<p>A note on substance abuse free floors- these floors are ofter populated with kids right out of rehab. Their parents feel they can send their troubled student to college and this will keep them from temptation- instead they meet mainly others right out of rehab. Not a positive solution.</p>
<p>As far as an extremely academic school being less of a “party school” these students use much more pot and prescription drugs- very heavy use on weekends, to avoid a hang over from drinking. Don’t want to give a study day to a hang over. They are very smart…in all areas including this area. (This has been reported to me by several parents of kids at Stanford, as in …"don’t worry it is everywhere, on every campus, even here).</p>
<p>So- what is your definition of “partying”?</p>
<p>starbright really? I wouldn’t assume kids would lie (ere) the same way at all schools. If a school has a proud party reputation they may be skewed one way, if the administration is trying to quell a party hard reputation and the kids are aware and supportive of it they may be skewed in another. The regional attitudes about alcohol use and abuse may also affect the way kids in the PNW, the Midwest and the South answer. Don’t you think kids at MIT and UCSC would lie differently for a variety of reasons? </p>
<p>The point for me is that the data would be flawed and drawing conclusions from flawed data gives you flawed conclusions. Therefore I question idad’s thesis that “statistics” garnered from theses “surveys” are more valid/valuable than anecdotal data.</p>
<p>Statistics for 911 calls–if you can get them–are not that meaningful. Some colleges have amnesty policies for those who call and/or those for whom calls are made. Other colleges don’t. Kids at the former are more likely to call 911 than the latter.</p>
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<p>Actually most of the psychometric literature points to some fundamental, basic directions in which skewedness occurs due to self-report bias (with with very sensitive, illegal, and counternormative behavior). It’s predictable and relatively constant and no, I would not expect that students are even necessarily lying (et alone collectively lying in particular directions en masse, depending upon which school they attend). Certainly not if its anonymous data collection (biased yes, in predictable and statistically adjustable directions, lying no). I have lots of empirical data to back this up, but there is a history of published evidence across the field of testing. </p>
<p>While we can debate the errors in any survey- and they do exist to be sure- I think you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who does research of any kind professionally who would actually agree that somehow anecdotal information from a tiny select sample of one’s contact points is more valuable than a large scale survey standardized across a larger sample or set of contexts. </p>
<p>But apologies, we are derailing the thread with this.</p>
<p>Here is a modification to the question - at what schools is it not possible to get a decent night’s sleep without calling the cops/wearing earplugs? UCSB has a party school rep despite its excellent science departments because of the uncontrolled noise factor in the off-campus Isla Vista student housing. It is true that parties occur at all college campuses (except perhaps the ones where hell yawns for the miscreants). However, there is a vast difference between places where partying is isolated to areas and times which are predictable and allow for non-partying folks to sleep and those where a dance turns into a riot complete with burning dumpsters and hovering helicopters. Of course, every “dull” dorm will have its loud moments, but statistically speaking, which schools tolerate an untenable level of noise in the dorms during the wee hours on a nightly basis? I, for one, don’t want to throw away savings on a school which cannot or will not enforce simple consideration for ones fellow students.</p>
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<p>Reliable enough for the Harvard School of Public Health surveys, running since the early 1990s. Reliable enough to be included on every major survey package purchase and implemented by every college in America. Reliable enough for the COFHE surveys administered annually by the assocation of the top 30 schools in the country, including all the Ivies and the top LACs. Reliable enough for the federal government to require making this data available upon request.</p>
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<p>The only people who will tell you that heavy binge drinking is ubiquitous are heavy binge drinking schools. There are HUGE differences in campus cultures. A low-binge drinking rate school won’t feel as drunk and be so disruptive as a high binge drinking rate school. If your daughters are looking for an environment that is conducive to normal college life without having students vomiting and urinating in the hallways of your dorm, then I would strongly recommend that you attempt to get the surveyed binge drinking rates of schools of interest. You might get some big surprises.</p>
<p>It’s the secondary effects from the high binge drinking rates that are so disruptive. Those are reported in the Harvard College Alcohol Study, too.</p>
<p>astrodeb, noise is one secondary effect of high binge drinking. Others are vandalized dorms (that your sober student may be charged for), vandalized campuses, vomit in the bathrooms, and frequently having to take dorm-mates to the emergency room.</p>
<p>From this article, I would say that Penn State is a heavy binge drinking school:</p>
<p>[160</a> arrested in unofficial ‘State Patty’s Day’ in State College | - PennLive.com](<a href=“http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/index.ssf/2010/02/160_arrested_in_unofficial_sta.html]160”>160 arrested in unofficial 'State Patty's Day' in State College - pennlive.com)</p>
<p>Penn State is a notoriously high bingeing school. NPR’s This American Life did a program on it.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=396[/url]”>http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=396</a></p>
<p>My impression from reading the Tartan is that while there is definitely partying (and sometimes excessive partying at the frats at least two of which have been shut down in recent years), there are plenty of people who don’t drink.</p>
<p>That This American Life segment was pretty depressing. I’d hate to be the woman whose yard has become a favorite place for people to relieve themselves.</p>
<p>A few years ago a poster named mini had all the statistics for college drinking because of his job.<br>
If I remember - binge drinking was related to: isolated college, largely white population, high Greek presence, ? someone PM mini and see if he’s still around…</p>
<p>Binge drinking, according to mini, is correlated with </p>
<p>rural college,
residential college,
students whiter than average,
students richer than average,
co-ed college,
high Greek presence,
emphasis on spectator sports,
secular college.</p>
<p>I’d hate to live somewhere where students thought it was just adorable to get drunk, vomit or pee in my yard, and pull up stop signs cemented into the ground. Gee how cute.</p>
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