American college students are total drunks. That’s not news but, according to an article by Robert Preidt in USA Today, colleges don’t seem too worried about it. As Preidt writes, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Minnesota, Toben Nelson, recently conducted a survey of university administrators and,
asked if they were following recommendations from the U.S. National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism’s college drinking task force 2002 report on the best strategies for reducing student drinking.
[Nelson’s] 2008 survey showed there was “very little action on the task force recommendations and very little implementation,” Nelson said in a news release from the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research. “Very few had even had conversations in the communities.” Nelson and colleagues found that only one-third of college communities performed compliance checks for illegal alcohol sales, only 15% mandated server training, only 7% restricted the number of alcohol outlets, and only 2% raised alcohol prices.
Most of the administrators did say they had heard of the task force report but apparently most didn’t read it or deem it worthy of implementation.
Still, there seems to be something missing here. How about the colleges that did implement the recommendations. Did things get better?
Read the abstract of Nelson’s research paper here.[Image via]
