‘Party school’ label a stunt, but campus drinking a big problem

The folks at the Princeton Review are pretty secretive about how they select the nation’s top party schools, but if you look at the schools that are selected each year, a curious pattern emerges. They are spread out around the country, many in major media markets, which leads some to suspect that the list originates in the publicity office rather than the editorial office of the Review.

Even if they suspect it’s just a publicity stunt, how many newspapers, television and radio stations can resist such a story when the local alma mater makes the list?

So relax, Georgians, there’s no reason to suspect that the University of Georgia, the new No. 1 party school, is any worse than hundreds of other American colleges.

But that’s not to say that the party school phenomenon isn’t an important problem. Wikipedia defines a party school as “a college or university that has a reputation for heavy alcohol and drug use or a general culture of licentiousness,” and a lot of American colleges and universities, including UGA, fit into that category.

College campuses are the last places in America where overtly intoxicated conduct, like falling down stairs and passing out on the lawn, is accepted as normal behavior. National surveys show that 44 percent of college students are binge drinkers, but at party schools they are a clear majority and crimes like date rape and sexual assault are nearly always tied to alcohol abuse. Over a half-million students are injured every year by drunken students and 1,700 of them die. They fall off roofs or are hit by cars while lying in the road or, most senseless of all, several dozen die of alcohol poisoning every year as part of fraternity hazing rituals.

Administrators’ attempts to deal with the problem have not been effective. Sentencing binge drinkers to education classes is as senseless as sending Lindsey Lohan to rehab. Students return to drinking as soon as they get out of the program, often the same day. Informing parents is a better option, since they often control the purse strings and can issue an ultimatum: Change your behavior or the checks will disappear and the party will be over.

Many college administrators quietly wink at the students’ behavior for the sake of keeping them as customers. The results of beer pong tournaments, for example, are posted on dormitory walls and the pingpong balls with the college logo that are used in the game are sold in the campus bookstore.