An addendum to the Tufts Alcohol and Drug Use Survey singled out first year students in order to gain information about drinking habits, drug use and general satisfaction within their first few weeks at the University.
The recently released Freshman First Week Experience Survey, taken in Oct. 2004, surveyed 600 freshmen - or 47.1 percent of the Class of 2008 - who responded to an online questionnaire from Health Services.
"People need to consider that first-year students are really a different group. Seventeen is really different than 21," survey coordinator and Director of Drug and Alcohol Education Services Margot Abels said.
In fact, the impetus for a freshman-only survey came from questions asked in a May 2001 survey conducted by Community Health Program professors Charlene Galarneau and Edith Balbach, which did not isolate first-years into a separate category.
"We recommended that special attention be paid to [freshmen] because they seemed to experience disproportionately negative effects," Galarneau said. "We found that among first-year students there are fewer drinkers, and they drink less often, but they tend to drink more when they drink."
Tufts' alcohol policy is aimed at reducing the potential harm and abuse which result from alcohol consumption. According to Galarneau, answers to open-ended questions on the 2001 survey indicated that freshmen were at particular risk for harm from alcohol abuse and misuse.
"There are a number of students who have had fairly little or no experience with alcohol before coming to Tufts and that presents another set of potential harms," she said.
"I feel like for early college students, a lot of people don't know - are [these students] adults? How do we treat them? What's their sense of responsibility to the community, to themselves, to their roommates and friends?" Abels said.
First-year students are also unique, Abels said, in that they come to campus with their own perceptions of and history with alcohol use. The survey indicated that more than 80 percent of respondents had already tried alcohol before coming to Tufts.
Dean of Students Bruce Reitman said that years of parental involvement are most important in helping students make smart decisions once they get to Tufts.
"I send out materials to families of [students] who are about to join the [Tufts] community ... telling them the values that they, the families, have imbued in them - in the 17 years before they go to Tufts - are going to be the values that are most important in the decisions they make about lifestyle," Reitman said.
The survey agreed: 85.1 percent of respondents who drank indicated that their immediate family taught them about drinking "by practicing responsible drinking themselves."
Issues of legality and punishment also influence first years more than upperclassmen.
"I'd think that underclassmen are a little more afraid of the repercussions," Abels said. "Upperclassmen have seen the policy lived out."
Abels said that a worthwhile discussion of alcohol requires "opening up, breaking some of the taboos." It is especially difficult, however, to talk to first-year students about alcohol because none of them are of legal drinking age.
"It's very complicated when you're living in a country where the legal drinking age forces you to bury your head in the sand," she said. "If people come into my office, they're surprised that if they talk to us they're not written up. Yes, we talk to the judicial people, but we talk about trends, not individual cases."
Reitman said that any discussion regarding alcohol use must be honest. "I don't tell [first-years] that I expect them never to touch alcohol - that's na??ve. We're not going to facilitate [alcohol use] because we can't, but we're going to talk about reasonable decisions," he said.
Reitman also lamented the fact that the current drinking age prevents faculty members from "model[ing] responsible drinking." He mentioned that individual departments held Friday afternoon student-faculty sherry hours when the drinking age was 18. He gave this as an example where alcohol was used in a "natural setting" and where "people weren't abusing it."
Alcohol has turned from a complement to an evening's activities to "the evening activity," Reitman said.
"What [students are] saying is not that there's nothing to do, but that there's no place they can go and have a party the way they want to have it, which includes the use of alcohol and only the seniors are going to be able to drink legally," he said.
