Thursday, Apr 17, 2008

More focus on college drinking, please

By Larry Sterne

Thursday, Apr 17, 2008 09:49

As the father of a 20-year-old girl, now a college sophomore, I was struck by two recent  studies examining the transition between high school and college. Both focus on the connection between students' experience with high school drinking and with drinking during their first year of college.   Like many parents, I have listened with some horror to stories from my daughter about ambulances showing up at her former college dorm several times in one night to pick up students with alcohol poisoning. And about each day having its own special drinking name, e.g. "Thirsty Thursday." This seamy side of college life is left unseen and unmentioned in most high-gloss college brochures and most presentations given by college reps at our high schools.   But, I want to focus on the high school piece of the transition to college life, to the connection between drinking in high school and drinking in college.  A study of more than 1,200 17-19-year-old students in the March 2008 issue of Substance Abuse Treatment, Prevention, and Policy concludes that parental monitoring and supervision during the last year of high school can reduce high school drinking, which, in turn, influences how much, or if,  a student drinks in college.  In blunt terms, the more students drink in high school the more they drink in college.   Another recent study by  University at Buffalo's Research Institute on Addictions, found that increases in young women's drinking during the first year of college can have dangerous physical, sexual and psychological implications. Some 27% of the 870 incoming freshman surveyed said they abstained from alcohol the year before entering college. But, during the first year of college that percentage fell to 12%.   Here's what that means in terms of a freshman girl's risk for physical and sexual abuse: Less than 2% of those who abstained reported physical abuse and 7% reported sexual victimization while 7% percent of women who drank in high school and continued in college reported physical abuse and a startling 19% reported sexual victimization.   Much is being done to educate younger teens. Researchers from the Center for Substance Abuse Resarch at the University of Maryland, College Park, single out two parent and teen education programs as being particularly effective: Preparing for the Drug-Free Years (now known as Guiding Good Choices) and the Iowa Strengthening Families Program (now known as The Strengthening Families Program: For Parents and Youth 10-14). Both focus on competency training sessions for parents, and include adolescents, in five-seven two-hour trainings.   Clearly, however, there needs to be more focus not just on preventing drinking in middle school and high school, but also on educating students and their parents about what to expect with the sudden transition to the much-less-controlled environment students will find in college.   For too many students, the sudden freedom of college is overwhelming. The rule-setting and monitoring of high schools and parents are gone and they find themselves ill-equipped to self-regulate their drinking.   My daughter offers one excellent proposal: Students are more likely to listen to peers who have been there. Bring college students back to the high schools to talk about their own negative experiences with alcohol abuse, the price they paid, and what they wish someone had told them when they were high school seniors.

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