The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism’s latest effort to tackle binge drinking on campuses has taken the form of a comparison tool that will allow college officials to weigh the effectiveness of different prevention strategies, and to use the information to guide policy choices.
The tool, known as the College Alcohol Intervention Matrix, or CollegeAIM, was unveiled here on Tuesday. It features nearly 60 strategies — half focused on changes in colleges’ drinking environments, and half focused on interventions and educational programs for students — and evaluations of each one.
College administrators could use the tool like “a menu in a restaurant,” said George F. Koob, director of the institute, which is part of the National Institutes of Health, in an interview. Currently, officials might hear ideas for combating dangerous or underage drinking by word of mouth, he said, but this effort centralizes a broad spectrum of approaches.
Traci L. Toomey, a professor of epidemiology and community health at the University of Minnesota’s School of Public Health and an alcohol-policy expert, said she had seen “so many campuses struggle trying to figure out what works.” Ms. Toomey, who helped develop the tool, said it wouldn’t “solve the politics” that obstruct some effective methods, like banning alcohol sales at athletic events. However, she said, it could “help guide what we advocate for.”
The institute mailed materials about CollegeAIM to all two-year and four-year colleges and universities nationwide this week, Mr. Koob said. Administrators can also use the tool online.
A 21st-Birthday Warning
The tool doesn’t break new scientific ground on binge drinking and underage alcohol use, said John D. Clapp, director of the Higher Education Center for Alcohol and Drug Misuse Prevention and Recovery at Ohio State University. Consultants have provided similar information to colleges for some time, he said.
And Jennifer Matthews, an associate professor of health education at East Carolina University and an expert on college students’ substance use, said many of the strategies don’t look much different from the ones outlined in a 2002 report from the institute, “A Call to Action: Changing the Culture of Drinking at U.S. Colleges,” that is considered the authority on how to combat campus alcohol abuse.
But Ms. Matthews called the comparison structure “really useful.” And Mr. Clapp, who worked on the new project, said the model’s design has filled a gap in the field by “matching a constellation of strategies to the problems that a campus might experience.” He added that many of them “haven’t been adopted widely. This might increase that.”
Among the methods covered by the report is AlcoholEDU, an online educational module that many colleges require new students or violators of college policy to view. It received the highest possible effectiveness rating, but was labeled a high-cost approach. What about establishing a dry campus? Not very effective, and somewhat expensive.
Compliance checks — in which campuses and local law enforcement assess whether alcohol servers and vendors are checking students’ ages — got a high effectiveness label, with moderate cost. Another intervention involved colleges’ sending their students a 21st-birthday card warning them against celebratory drinking; it received low-effectiveness and low-cost ratings.
The tool was not meant to rank strategies based on their effectiveness, Mr. Koob emphasized. “We don’t want to sing the praises of, or downgrade, any particular intervention,” he said. It is clear, though, that a combination of strategies is likely to be the best choice, he said.
“You can educate young people using any number of products and programs,” he said. “But on the other hand, if the community in which the campus resides doesn’t also support that message, any individual intervention is not going to be as effective.”
‘A Little Bit Hit and Miss’
Regional working groups will help colleges use the tool and will collect feedback from officials, Mr. Koob said. The tool will be adapted in response to such reports and new research, he said.
Mr. Clapp pointed out one limitation of the tool: It doesn’t tell colleges how to carry out those approaches or how to pay for them. “The level of resources out there to commit to these problems is not great,” he said, citing a significant decline in federal and state grants that used to help colleges target alcohol abuse.
Still, Mr. Koob said, the working groups would be able to help put the strategies into effect.
Jonathan C. Gibralter, president of Wells College, in New York, and chair of the institute’s working group of college presidents, said the tool would have helped when he spearheaded a public campaign against college students’ alcohol use as president of Frostburg State University, in Maryland.
“Sometimes it was a little bit hit and miss for us,” he said. His administration tried methods “because they intuitively seemed like the right thing to do,” but “we didn’t really have any data at that point that we were relying on.”
Felicia McGinty, vice chancellor for student affairs at Rutgers University at New Brunswick, said she hadn’t ever seen something as comprehensive as the tool. She said it would guide the efforts of a committee of students, faculty and staff members, practitioners, and community members who recently began examining ways to prevent high-risk drinking.
The tool is not perfect, Mr. Koob said, but could become one mechanism in a broader movement to change attitudes about drinking on campuses. He acknowledged that such efforts have faced an uphill battle for decades, but it’s not hopeless. He cited, as an example, a success in a different realm: Smoking cigarettes has become far less socially acceptable over time.
“We’re hoping to get to the point,” he said, “where getting sloshed completely is not cool either.”
