Students from all 11 New England Small College Athletic Conference (NESCAC) schools were asked earlier this month to complete an online alcohol survey created by the deans of the NESCAC schools to assess the respective alcohol cultures on each campus.
The first-ever NESCAC-wide alcohol survey asks students to comment on their experiences and interactions with alcohol during this academic year. The survey aims to establish a social norm across NESCAC campuses that accurately depicts the college drinking culture at each school rather than dispersing the pervasive myth of widespread excess alcohol usage, according to Dean of Student Affairs Bruce Reitman.
Reitman said that a social norming campaign that does research for certain populations is necessary in order to educate students on how to intervene when they see friends in trouble before medical attention is required.
"Social norming is establishing the norm and letting everybody in the community know what our own students, to the NESCAC schools, actually say they do for social life and drinking, and dangerous drinking and how often they drink, and to let that information be known to the community to counter this myth, that I hope is a myth, that everybody drinks and that everybody drinks to excess," he said. "That's the basis for the research that's part of the social normingcampaign."
The deans are not focusing on the issue of binge drinking, Reitman said. The purpose of the survey is to create a body of research illustrating that college culture is not alcohol-driven. Reitman anticipates that the results will refute the perception of colleges as hotbeds of excess drinking and instead show that most students do not partake in binge drinking.
"The research that has been done at some places, which is what the NESCAC schools are now undertaking, has shown that the number of people who drink dangerously is actually pretty low, and that the number of people who don't drink at all is pretty substantially high," he said. "People never hear about that, and they should."
Director of Health Education Ian Wong said that his office has examined various data sets, including those of the American College Health Association, to observe the drinking culture on campus. He also noted that the actual amount of alcohol use by college students is always lower than the perception.
"What we're seeing on campus is that students are thinking that other students are drinking at a higher rate than they really are," Wong said. "People talk about the X number of students that were transported to the hospital by Tufts Emergency Medical Services this weekend, but not about the other 4,900 students that weren't."
"I think seeing the data will make freshmen feel less pressured to participate in a social scene they are uncomfortable with," Michael Lambert, a junior who took the survey, said.
Once the data from the NESCAC alcohol survey are collected before the end of this semester, Wong will convene a student task force to work on the social norm campaign and to create a poster campaign featuring images that will grab the attention of students.
"We really have to make these images something that resonates with students, a tagline that resonates with students," he said.
The campaign will be campus-wide and year-round but will primarily target the incoming freshman class, according to Wong. The social-norming campaign will aim to lower the rate of alcohol-related medical transports that take place early in the academic year.
"The biggest issue I have with alcohol violations is with freshmen and sophomores; juniors and seniors don't come close," Wong said. "The other piece, too, if you look at our data, September and October have the highest rates of violations. I think the students are slowly learning other behaviors later in the year."
All of the NESCAC schools share a similar percentage of enrolled students who are transported to hospitals for alcohol-related reasons. Around 100 Tufts students are transported to the hospital by TEMS each year, according to Reitman.
"The general thought in looking at numbers of [alcohol related medical transports] is very similar from one school to the next," he said. "We all fall within a range of about 1.9 to 2.3 percent of our enrollment being transported each year. We're right around two percent, which for us means around 100 students per year."
The deans are aiming to reduce the number of medical transports per year for all of the NESCAC schools by encouraging bystander intervention without calling for change in the schools' various alcohol policies, Reitman said.
The Tufts alcohol policy was recently tweaked for this academic year, allowing students a warning for their first violation before receiving Disciplinary Probation I. The current alcohol policy encourages students to call TEMS if someone is in need of serious medical attention without the burden of disciplinary action, according to Reitman.
"It's not the most severe or most lenient policy among NESCAC, I know, but there's been generally good feedback about the current policy after the tweak this year that was requested by the [Tufts Community Union] Senate and suggested by the Alcohol Task Force," he said.
