The college party stereotype involving red Solo cups and students walking in drunken stupors on Ohio University’s campus might not be as true as most people think.
A Feb. 28 Alcohol and Other Drugs survey distributed by Health Promotion division of OU’s Campus Involvement Center showed there was a 7 percent decrease in students partaking in high-risk behavior, including binge drinking, from the 1,262 out of 17,007 undergraduate students who participated in the survey.
Numbers first began to decline in 2005 when 79 percent of students surveyed said they were involved in high-risk drinking behaviors, dropping to 63 percent in 2013.
Terry Koons, associate director of the Campus Involvement Center, said the university conducts the survey every other year to measure the amount of students actively participating in events involving alcohol.
“The challenge is that you have to continually do this because the population is constantly changing,” Koons said. “You have to just keep moving and continue the efforts.”
Ryan Lombardi, vice president for Student Affairs, said he was enlightened by the survey results.
“I’m very pleased that the number of students who report high-risk drinking behaviors is declining,” Lombardi said. “There are a host of initiatives that we have taken, led in large part by the Health Promotion staff.”
Lombardi credits programs such as AlcoholEdu, new judicial sanctions and the medical emergency assistance program.
The university pays closer attention to the survey results rather than the number of judicial referrals to judge drinking behavior, said Jenny Hall-Jones, interim dean of students.
“The numbers that we really pay attention to are the self-reported data that we get from AlcoholEdu and the Alcohol and Other Drugs Survey because that’s students talking about their actual behavior, not just when they’ve gotten in trouble for something,” she said.
However, some OU students said they don’t think that binge drinking plays a significant part in the OU student culture.
“I don’t think there was a problem,” said Karen Martinez, a sophomore studying political science and pre-law. “I just think that the title of being a party school gave the impression that there might have been a problem.”
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