Looking at Collegiate Drinking: Part II

Deconstructing Collegiate Drinking

If what alcohol and drinking mean as icons of contemporary collegiate life are important, then such meanings likely impact the choices students make regarding drinking. And if we can understand the process by which these meanings are ascribed, then we will likely be able to move one step closer to impacting collegiate drinking.

I suspect that the importance of alcohol in collegiate life is such that it will never cease or be controlled to the extent that only those of legal age will consume and then only in accordance with medical guidelines recommended by experts—no more than 2 standard drinks per day for males, 1 for females. That said, I do believe that collegiate drinking can be influenced and in a way that sees the percentage of students that choose to drink reduced and the frequency and quantity of those who do imbibe reduced as well.

There will always be those who experience a problem with alcohol and find themselves drinking because they “cannot not drink,” a.k.a. alcohol dependence, but such drinking by college students is limited—although some (many?) may progress to “alcoholism” propelled by their collegiate experience. The number of problems, however, associated with collegiate drinking—what I call, “untoward consequences"—can be reduced below the apparently intractable numbers that have been reported consistently for years. Ironically, this will not be because of more clever policies regarding alcohol. Likewise, changes will not result from innovative programs alone or smart and witty publicity campaigns. Rather, change will come as students move through the process by which they re-ascribe meaning to alcohol and drinking that affects the choices they make regarding the use of the drug and the circumstances that warrant that use.

There is the old adage we are so familiar with as to have made it a trite cliché—“You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink.” Although this may be true, you can salt the oats. If I shift my focus from trying to “make students” do the right thing and, instead, shift that focus to affecting the reasoning they employ that results in choices to “do the wrong thing,” students may well move in the direction of change of their own volition. We know this will happen because it already has been documented in the “maturing out” process. And whether this process is learning the “cause and effect” relationship between high-risk behavior and untoward consequences or simply the result of the natural developmental as students age from late adolescence to early adulthood during the span of a traditional collegiate career is all but irrelevant. What is pertinent is that students change and they do so of their own volition. As Sandra Anise Barnes, the poet, wrote, “It is so hard when I have to, and easy when I want to.”

The challenge for those concerned about collegiate drinking is not to “reinvent the wheel” but to keep from reinventing the flat tire. We may already have the answer to reducing the unacceptable number of untoward consequences associated with drinking…we see this as students progress through the aging-out process. The challenge is to hasten this process so as to close the window of opportunity for those untoward consequences to occur.

If we study the process by which students change the meaning they ascribe to alcohol and drinking we can artificially hasten this process, and in so doing, reduce the untoward consequences. This will not necessarily reduce the number of students who choose to drink, but it is likely to affect the number who choose to drink on a given occasion and, more importantly, the way they drink.

If we can resist the temptation to use public policy exclusively as the means by which we “solve the collegiate drinking problem” and instead focus on altering the meaning students place on the drug and its consumption, it is entirely likely that students will fix “the problem” themselves.

In conclusion, we have come a long way. Environmental management strategies and programs like social norms marketing, Brief Alcohol Screening and Intervention for College Students (BASICS), Screening/Brief Intervention/Referral to Treatment (SBIRT), have done much to address high-risk and dangerous collegiate drinking. But such external programs and approaches that serve to “do something to” students are not enough to change a culture. For the culture of campus drinking to change, students must come to a point where the meaning they ascribe to alcohol and drinking change. Then and only then will the culture on American college campuses change. As in psychotherapy, effective therapists know that individual change is an “inside job.”

To read more on this topic in some detail look at When They Drink: Deconstructing Collegiate Drinking (http://www.community.rowancas.org/node/21) and When They Drink: Is Collegiate Drinking the Problem We Think It Is? (http://www.rowan.edu/cas/resources/documents/CollegiateDrinking.doc.doc)

Comments welcome at chapman.phd@gmail.com