Is Drinking Different at Dartmouth?

Just over a year ago a headline in The Dartmouth declared: "Dartmouth Drinks More than Nation." Is it true? Recently compiled data seem to show that the answer is, emphatically,

The chart below compares 1990-91 national data from the Core Alcohol and Drug Survey, a standardized questionnaire I helped develop, with the 1991 results of Dartmouth's Core Survey. The responses of 44,985 students at 56 colleges and universities granting bachelors degrees are listed as "Other 4-Year Schools." The column marked "Dartmouth" describes the responses of 278 of our undergraduates, randomly selected and stratified by class. (Four hundred surveys were initially mailed out, yielding a highly respectable response rate of 69.5 percent.)

Compared to national figures, Dartmouth clearly outranks the group of "Other 4-Year Schools" on measures of alcohol consumption and binge drinking, and ranks lower on those measures when it comes to abstinance or minimal use of alcohol.

Don't be misled into thinking that the College's drinking habits are unique, however. Other Core Institute data indicate that Dartmouth is actually part of a regional pattern of heavy drinking. The 14,352 college students sampled in the Northeast demonstrated the highest rates of alcohol consumption in the country. Not only did these students average 7.1 drinks per week, but 52.9 percent reported binge drinking in the two weeks prior to the survey.

These regional figures are lower than—but not so very divergent from—Dartmouth's.

Now let's take this a step further. The regional figures include both twoyear and four-year students. Recognizing from other data that students at four-year schools drink more heavily than those at two-year schools, I asked statisticians managing the Core national database to perform a special analysis of the data and isolate figures for the 9,172 students sampled from four-year schools in the Northeast. Refining the data in this way, we found that the average number of drinks per week rises to 8.2 and the percentage of students bingeing in the last two weeks rises to 57.2 percent. Dartmouth's drinking looks like other fouryear schools in the Northeast.

It's still too much. PHILIP MEILMAN, directorof the Counseling Center atthe College of William andMary and former coordinator of alcohol programs atDartmouth.