Response of Colleges to Risky Drinking College Students

Heavy drinking and related consequences continue to impact college campuses where each year alcohol is responsible for fatalities, assaults, serious injuries, and arrests that occur among college students. Several approaches aimed at reducing the harm incurred by students and the college communities as a result of heavy drinking are being used with varying success. A review of interventions including educational, individual, and environmental approaches are described, as well as, new strategies of promise. Interventions that have attempted to reduce risky drinking and related problems have found some success, yet high and risky drinking patterns continue. As such, concerns over implementation of evidence-based treatments and areas in need of further study are discussed.

… At the most primary level, colleges are charged with educating students about campus rules and regulations and the effects of alcohol. The most common approach to educating students is through the implementation of basic awareness and education programs. This type of prevention work on most college campuses is typically delivered at orientation sessions for new students; alcohol awareness weeks and other special events; and, in some instances, instructors infusing alcohol-related facts and issues into regular academic courses ¹³. Although this approach has the potential to reach a large number of students at a relatively low per student cost, this category of prevention approaches have been found ineffective when conducted in isolation ¹¹, however further research is needed to investigate the way in which these programs can be used in conjunction with and contribute to the impact of a more comprehensive prevention program.

As noted, the majority of college students have consumed alcohol within the past semester ⁹, therefore colleges typically focus on ways in which to impact current drinkers using harm reduction models of intervention. The National Institute for Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) has identified Tier 1 interventions as those with favorable outcomes among college students in independent evaluations (NIAAA, 2002). Two of the example programs, Brief Alcohol Screening and Intervention for College Students BASICS; ¹⁴ and Alcohol Skills Training Program ASTP; ¹⁵, are commonly implemented on college campuses. Both the group ASTP and one-on-one BASICS programs incorporate educating students on basic alcohol information relevant to their experience; building motivation to change drinking; challenging expectancies about alcohol's effects; correcting misperceptions through normative feedback; providing cognitive-behavioral skills training, including how to monitor daily alcohol consumption and stress management; and developing a tailored plan for reducing alcohol use and/or harm. Most often, these approaches are used to intervene with college students sanctioned for violating campus alcohol policies. These motivational interventions have shown the ability to reduce alcohol use among heavy drinking college students e.g., ^16,17,18 however the implementation of such programs can be costly and therefore limits the number of college students that may receive such intervention approaches. Additionally, the support for delivering the interventions with fidelity has become a concern as universities use published evidence-based interventions ¹⁹. The training and supervision needed to implement intervention approaches as they were designed for research is challenging, which has the potential to impact effective execution of evidence-based treatments….

Full article at: http://goo.gl/PvsN8t

By: Mastroleo NR1, Logan DE2.

• 1Assistant Professor (Research), Department of Behavioral and Social Sciences and the Center for Alcohol and Addiction Studies, Brown University.
• 2Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, Department of Behavioral and Social Sciences, Brown University. 

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