According to the 2015 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 58.0% of full-time college students 18-22 drank in the past month and 37.9% of those binge drank. For many people, drinking is part of the college experience. Most young adults drink for the first time when they get to college, especially if they join a fraternity. Despite the fact that most college students are under the legal drinking age, there is an unspoken rule among some administrators to look the other way.
Often parents view drinking as just something all kids do – and something they did themselves – and protest any suggestion they be punished. Unfortunately, since many schools depend on alumni donations, it’s not uncommon for these incidents to be swept under the rug.
Each year 1,825 college students 18-24 die from alcohol related unintentional injuries, 696,000 are sexually assaulted and 1 in 4 report academic consequences. In addition to the harm to students, this increases the cost of healthcare and security for the college and damage to the school’s reputation.
In response, CollegeAIM – the College Alcohol Intervention Matrix – was created to help schools address underage drinking. The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) developed the CollegeAIM guide and website to help university administrators choose from the many possible interventions to address harmful and underage college drinking. The guide was developed with input from college alcohol researchers, college student life and alcohol and other drug program staff.
To develop drinking prevention programs, colleges and universities should assess the problems on campus and set priorities, select strategies by exploring evidence-based interventions, plan how to implement the strategies and how to measure results and take action by implementing the strategies, evaluating them and refining the program.
The CollegeAIM program helps with the second of these – selecting a strategy – by rating the effectiveness of almost 60 different strategies and helping you identify which ones will reduce drinking the most. It also allows you to compare your current strategies with other options and find new, research-based strategies. Then you can choose a combination of approaches that fit your needs.
CollegeAIM has two sets of data: one for environmental-level interventions (those that apply to the campus community and student population as a whole) and one for interventions that target individual students (those in higher-risk groups like first-year students, student athletes and members of Greek organizations). There are also estimates of costs and barriers to implementation and citations for related research. The website has a strategy planning worksheet.
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