<p>There's both bad news and good news in college drinking scenes these days, which emphasize why it is important to choose your school well, if that is a particular concern (for many students, it isn't, even if it is for their parents.)</p>
<p>I'm going to use Swarthmore as an example, because it has a relatively mild drinking scene, much lower than the national average. Roughly 30% of students are reported to be binge drinkers, as opposed to the 44% national average. What this means is that 30% of students report having 5 or more 1 oz. drinks at one sitting at least once in the past two weeks. </p>
<p>This information (at any school) has to be caveated. Recent studies indicate that students underestimate their number of drinks, usually by 1. So the number of binge drinkers is underestimated that way. More important, when they asked students to pour out a standard drink, researchers have found that the average drink poured by college students is 1.75 ounces (range 1.5 to 2). In other words, a student who says he drank 4 drinks in one sitting in the past weeks is not classified as a binge drinker, even though, on average, he has likely had 5 drinks, each with 1.75 ounces, or 8.75 alcoholic drinks. And (another underestimate of campus drinking), it is actually quite rare for a binge drinker to actually do so only once in two weeks - it is usually more than that - and this may vary widely school to school. So the actual binge drinking rate (at any school) is likely 20% or so higher than reported.</p>
<p>It is also, generally speaking, higher for white students, higher for males, and higher for first-year students. This gives you the general lay of the land.</p>
<p>But at residential colleges generally speaking 20-30% of students are total abstainers. So the question really is whether of the rest, there is a moderate drinking culture or a binge drinking one. Here is where the difference in schools comes into play. At Swarthmore, the binge drinking rate of 30% - plus the added factors above, means that the ratio of bingers to moderates is roughly 1 to 1, and with the number of abstainers added in, on the whole the bingeing culture will be heavily moderated. If you did the numbers, you'd find the opposite at, say, Williams, with an uncorrected 52% binge drinking rate. That isn't to say one can't find abstainers, or moderate drinkers (there are actually statistically few of the latter), only that you have to look harder.</p>
<p>NW has most of the characteristics of a high-bingeing school: residential; Greek presence; higher incomes; heavily white; co-ed; big-time athletics (though let's also grant, less than a lot of places); non-religious. The one characteristic that doesn't fit is that it is not rural. What was described above does not sound extreme, from what I know from my professional work.</p>
<p>Best thing to do, of course, is to surround oneself with friends who are not part of that culture, if that is what you want. You do have to work at it: a school with an uncorrected binge drinking rate of 44% (the national average) actually probably has about twice as many binge drinkers as moderate drinkers. But in a big school like NW, they are out there, and in large numbers, and if you involve yourself in activities where drinking isn't prominent, you can find plenty of folks outside the big drinking scene.</p>