Colleges, communities combat off-campus student drinking

Programs that bring colleges and their surrounding neighborhoods together may help reduce off-campus drinking problems, a new study suggests.

Researchers found that an alcohol control program at Western Washington University that also involved the community -- including increased police patrols in neighborhoods subject to loud and sometimes dangerous college parties, combined with efforts to make off-campus students better neighborhood residents -- led to a decline in student heavy episodic drinking (also called "binge" drinking).

The findings highlight the importance of college-community cooperation in combating problem drinking, according to lead researcher Robert F. Saltz, Ph.D., of the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation in Berkeley, CA.

"If you want to reach students living in the community, you need to work with city agencies and neighborhood associations," he says.

Such broad-level efforts also "get the students to understand that they aren't living in a bubble and are part of a community with norms and expectations about alcohol use and acceptable behavior," Saltz says.

The findings are published in a special supplemental issue of the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs devoted to college drinking problems. The study is one of 14 reported in the issue stemming from projects funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism's Rapid Response to College Drinking Problems initiative.