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 By David Dacus / STUDENT PUBLICATIONS |
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| The percentage of college students who say that they drink to get drunk has increased in the past four years. Tech plans to use the RWJF grant to curb binge drinking by changing attitudes and policies affecting drinking. | |
The Institute is forming a coalition with representatives of faculty, staff, students, and the surrounding community. The group will use the grant to identify methods of reducing the amount of binge drinking among students.
"Binge drinking is recognized as a problem that now touches large and small campuses," said Georgia Tech President Wayne Clough. "This grant will allow us to take much more aggressive measures than we have to date to educate our students and the community about the issues."
The grant is in support of the Foundation's program "A Matter of Degree: Reducing High-Risk Drinking Among College Students." Both the Foundation and the Institute are focusing only on consumption that meets the definition of binge drinking: five drinks at a sitting for males, four for females.
"[The title of the program] is important because it is not an effort to stamp out drinking, it is an effort to reduce binge drinking," said Lee Wilcox, vice president of student affairs. "We all understand that alcohol consumption is part of our culture for a significant fraction of people. Responsible drinking is something that is not a concern for Georgia Tech."
A recently released study from the Harvard School of Public Health points to binge drinking as a contributing factor to lapses in schoolwork, violence, and sexual harassment. Officials believe that reducing high-risk drinking will in turn reduce instances of those negative behaviors.
"We know that students who drink more don't do as well in school, are more likely to have accidents, to be involved in assaults, to be involved in sexual harassment, to fail out of school, and are more likely to end up with a police record," Wilcox explained. "It is not only the students who drink heavily that these things happen to, there is also a second-order effect on friends and associates."
The coalition will be co-chaired by Wilcox and Ronald Johnson, the head of the Georgia Department of Revenue's Alcohol Division. Nine community agencies as well as a number of campus representatives have been identified to take part. Andria Cole, who worked as a reporter and a 911 operator before coming to Tech, has been hired to work with the grant.
"Hopefully if we come up with these ideas and then we implement them, we can go back and forth and say 'is it working', if so, great, how can we improve it, if not, how can we fix it," Cole said. "The coalition will definitely be part of that process."
If the Foundation is satisfied with Tech's use of the grant, the Institute will be in line for a five-year grant. The longer grant, which has been awarded to several prior recipients of the one-year grant, is expected to amount to approximately $750,000.
"The five-year grant will allow us to expand the staff," Wilcox stated. "We could use some of the funds for programming alcohol-free events people can go to. We may develop quantitative goals as far as a percentage drop in high-risk drinking."
Despite decades of efforts to combat excessive drinking at Georgia Tech and around the country, studies like the one from the Harvard School of Public Health have shown little, if any, progress.
"In fact, the percentage of college students who say they drink to get drunk has gone up significantly in the past four years," said Wilcox. "If you look at the percentage of non-abstainers who say they drink to get drunk, it has increased from 39 percent to 52 percent. Georgia Tech data is a little worse than that-we have a higher percentage of students who say they binge drink."
"We know that the traditional educational programs haven't worked," Wilcox continued. "You can't just give a lecture to a new freshman coming in a dorm and expect that to make a difference-not that you shouldn't talk about it, but that kind of educational program just doesn't work."
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation selected Tech along with nine other universities to lead a national effort to curb binge drinking by changing norms, attitudes, policies, and practices affecting drinking. The Foundation cited model projects initiated by the Institute as reasons Tech was chosen.
"Our job this year with this campus community coalition is to come up with a whole bunch of creative ways to change the environments," Wilcox said. "Of course, nothing is going to change without students themselves deciding that this is something that they want to work on."
"The foundation is definitely keen on trying to come up with innovative ways of improving the situation," concurred Cole. "The thing I don't want people to think is that we are about prohibition. It is about trying to encourage students to act responsibly."
Georgia Tech's proposal to the RWJF was supported by letters of commitment from Atlanta Mayor Bill Campbell, Police Chief Beverly Harvard, and several other community leaders. Dr. Adewale Troutman, director of Public Health for Fulton County, was also the leaders supporting the grant proposal.
"I am enthusiastic to learn that Georgia Tech received the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Grant," Dr. Troutman said. "We wholeheartedly support this effort. I stand ready to commit my staff to making this project a success."