NIAAA Introduces Resource to Help Colleges Curb Student Drinking

The National Institute on Alcoholism and Alcohol Abuse has introduced a new tool to help colleges cut down on student drinking, CNN reports. CollegeAIM includes 60 alcohol interventions, with information on their effectiveness, costs and barriers to implementation.

The guide includes a wide variety of interventions, from requiring Friday morning classes to restricting happy hours and other drinking promotions.

“Despite our collective efforts to address it, high-risk drinking remains a significant and persistent problem on U.S. campuses,” George Koob, Ph.D., NIAAA Director, said in a news release. “While college officials have numerous options for alcohol interventions, they are not all equally effective. CollegeAIM can help schools choose wisely among available strategies, boosting their chances for success and helping them improve the health and safety of their students.”

According to NIAAA, underage drinking, as well as harmful drinking among students of legal drinking age, continues to be a major problem on U.S. campuses. Each year, an estimated 696,000 college students are assaulted by another student who has been drinking, while 97,000 students report experiencing alcohol-related sexual assault or date rape and 1,825 students die from alcohol-related injuries.

“In college, many times students drink in a way that most people don’t comprehend. They drink to accomplish a goal called becoming blackout drunk,” said Jonathan Gibralter, President of Wells College in New York state and Chair of the NIAAA College Presidents Working Group to Address Harmful and Underage Drinking. “They don’t know their own capacity, and oftentimes underage students get into situations where they find themselves in trouble and they don’t even know how they got there.”

While there are many programs designed to curb college drinking, school administrators don’t always have the resources to look at the research to figure out which programs are the best fit for their school, Gibralter said.