https://www.chicagomaroon.com/article/2017/9/28/week-eight-underage-students-transported-er-drinki/
I hope all the students are ok. It looks like there was a spike in this activity this year.
There’s also a spike in number of enrollees 
Still . . .
Happily my kid’s dorm not involved.
That’s not all that was spiked…nyuk, nyuk, nyuk. Sorry, could not resist.
I guess these students didn’t get the memo that UChicago is the place where fun goes to die.
I’m glad someone took these kids to the ER rather than leaving them on some couch/floor to ‘sleep it off,’
Also, I’m sure there is some correlation between this and the advent of ED I/II.
@ihs76 Correlation does not mean causation.
Let’s see . . . .These kids were so despondent over getting into their #1 school that they decided to drink their way through O-Week? Nah.
Perhaps they are among a batch of “lower quality” ED-admits that UChicago was willing to take in order to increase yield? Perhaps - but then according to Admissions they admitted very high quality kids. I suppose we’ll never know for sure. But I doubt things like GPA or standardized scores were all that different from last year’s.
Most likely they were clueless and overexcited. Hopefully they learned a lesson.
It would be interesting to know the impact on the individuals involved. These things can easily happen during first encounters with alcohol in a social setting, especially one fraught with anxiety and exhilaration at a time as momentous as leaving home and beginning college. At such a time long ago I came pretty near reaching the condition of those kids. I awoke the next morning feeling monumentally ashamed of myself and determined never to let that happen again. Education takes many forms.
@TomSrOfBoston did I say it did?
My father was a professor at an Ivy back in the day. He was so disgusted with kids arriving at college and not knowing how to handle alcohol that he handed me a Budweiser when I was in 6th grade and said ‘I want you to know how to drink by the time you start college.’ Maybe if it had been better beer, I may have been more tempted.
We’ve always had ready access to beer/wine in the house and our kids were welcome to partake in a reasonable manner in the family setting. They were never interested in more than 1 drink in the evening and that only occasionally. No mystique.
@ihs76 Then why did you make the statement that the drunkenness is in some way associated with the advent of ED?
^^ it was a joke?
I’m curious whether this is going to result in the school clamping down on underage drinking.
^^Doubt it. Still a pretty small percentage of the first year class.
The Maroon article mentioned that underage drinking-related violations have been on the uptick over the past few years. Could that be correlated with the building of these new, larger dorms? Or is the drinking going on elsewhere? Per the article, Max P and North led the way during O-Week, but they weren’t the only locations involved and the numbers are small anyway. Certainly given the larger number compared to prior O-Weeks it’s worth keeping an eye on the situation. No doubt the Maroon is on the job!
Most of us (I included) are excited about the idea that Chicago would compete with HYPS for top students.
“Clamping down on underage drinking” would not be a good move in that regard.
I hope you didn’t mean that without any irony. There is precisely a 0% chance that your kid’s dorm is not involved in underage drinking. The eight reported violations logged by the university police are like spotting eight ants at a picnic.
@JHS - I think “Happily my kid’s dorm not involved” meant the dorm wasn’t involved in the eight ER-related incidents from O-Week, not underage drinking completely.
There’s a difference in frequency between underage drinking on a college campus and having ambulances/emergency med teams show up to get people to the ER. One probably leaves more of a lasting impression/scare than the other, too.
The dorms mentioned in the article were not the sources of students going to the ER, they were places where the UCPD logged underage drinking violations. Essentially, the article was reporting two different, related stories: (1) An unprecedented number of students required emergency treatment for alcohol-related problems during O-Week, and (2) the campus police logged a high number of underage drinking violations in university dorms during O-Week. The way I read the article, the two were not the same thing.
@Cue7 - bingo. Exactly what I meant.
@JHS - 1) D’s dorm allows underage drinking, per D. 2) I am guilty of “underage drinking” - with no negative repurcussions because I acted like a responsible grownup. 3) Most people don’t realize that on private property you can drink underage legally. It’s purchasing liquor underage that’s the violation. This might vary by state of course but that’s the law here in MN. 4) Seven of the eight incidences were connected to the particular res halls and it’s naive to think otherwise. Unless of course those who were alcohol poisoned tottered back to their dorms and then passed out. That is a possibility.
My big question is whether certain dorms are connected to “underage drinking” incidences more than others. Has anyone looked through the logs last year to see if that’s the case?
Last year’s numbers
Max P = 9
North = 8
South = 8
Public street = 7
BJ = 2
Fraternities = 2
I-House = 1
Snell-Hitchcock = 0
9/19/16 - North
9/19/16 - North
9/21/16 - North
9/30/16 - Max P
10/1/16 - Max P
10/2/16 - North
10/15/16 - Public street
10/15/16 - Max P
10/15/16 - Max P
10/22/16 - Public street
10/22/16 - Max P
1022/16 - South
10/23/16 - South
10/30/16 - I-House
11/9/16 - South
11/20/16 - Max P
12/4/16 - South
1/13/17 - North
1/15/17 - BJ
1/16/17 - South
2/5/17 - Delta Upsilon
2/12/17 - Max P
2/19/17 - Public street
2/26/17 - Max P
3/9/17 - BJ
3/10/17 - South
3/30/17 - FIJI
3/31/17 - South
4/15/17 - North
4/22/17 - North
4/30/17 - South
5/12/17 - Max P
5/13/17 - Public street
5/26/17 - Public street
6/1/17 - North
6/3/17 - Public street
6/4/17 - Public street
Based on the data at #17, Is there something about livng in the newer halls that encourages dangerous drinking? Not saying any particular incident occurred there. Is it the type of student, the “party” environment (to the extent such exists), more social types, less community from the house systems (which tend to be larger in the new dorms), ???
If I were Marielle Sainvilus, University Director of Public Affairs, (who) told the Maroon that “it’s likely students did not consume the alcohol in University residence halls” and that “Underage drinking is strictly prohibited not only in the Residence Halls, but on the entire UChicago campus. While many of the calls came from College Housing, the actual consumption of alcohol likely occurred elsewhere”, I guess I’d be looking into what the data might be saying.
I am pretty certain Marielle Sainvilus was looking not at any data but at a lawyer- and PR-screened script that has nothing to do with reality.
I would hesitate to call the UCPD’s underage drinking violations records “data” relevant to anything but the workings of the UCPD. I think it’s safe to assume that on any night, in any dorm, there are anywhere from dozens to hundreds of violations of the “strict prohibition” against underage drinking, depending on what day of the week it is. It wouldn’t surprise me if the actual violations per capita were lower in Snitchcock than anywhere else, but I snort with laughter at the suggestion that they would be zero anywhere. I have no idea what causes the UCPD to register an underage drinking offense, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t bear any relationship to the actual frequency or seriousness of underage drinking.
The Maroon story is incoherent. I still can’t tell if “violations” and students transported to the ER are the same thing. The story says that “almost all” of the eight violations occurred in dorms, then lists seven reports from dorms. Then it says that “five of the six incidents” occurred after midnight.
Anyway. The number of incidents is so low that any variation among dorms of equivalent size could easity be random. And of course the dorms aren’t equivalent size. The three largest dorms have the most incidents. That said, I think it’s fairly obvious from the discussions on CC every spring that students who look forward to partying in their dorm overwhelmingly choose one of those three dorms over the other dorms.