WASHINGTON — Colleges are getting a new high tech tool to help them fight risky campus drinking. It’s called College AIM, a website and matrix put together by the National Institute on Alcohol and Alcoholism, along with a group of college presidents from around the country.
It’s designed to sort through strategies used successfully by schools across the nation and make them easily available in one place online.
George Koob, head of NIAAA, says the project was several years in the making and is intended to address a growing problem. While the numbers of students engaging in binge and underage drinking has remained fairly static in recent years, the intensity of that drinking has steadily increased.
“The goal is to drink as much as possible, as fast as possible and become as intoxicated as possible,” Koob says.
Today’s students seem to approach binge drinking differently than their parents did, leading to more hospitalizations and destroyed dreams.
For Koob, a trained neuroscientist, the most dangerous effect of binge drinking is its impact on the decision-making centers of the still developing brains of young adults under 25.
He says that impact “is not trivial” and there is real science prompting the NIAAA to prepare this new prevention effort.
At a webinar launching the site, Koob took questions from college leaders and campus health care professionals. At his side was Jonathan Gibralter, the president of Wells College in New York, who chaired a group of college leaders that worked on the site with the NIAAA.
At their very first get-together, Gibralter says, the college presidents admitted “we just don’t know what the resources are, and we don’t know how to access them.”
The site is designed to provide an answer, with more than 60 strategies. Some of them involve cutting availability of alcohol and increasing enforcement, while others focus on teaching.
Education is at the heart of many approaches to cutting risky drinking on campus. In essence, says Koob, the goal is to change attitudes and make students aware of the consequences on their lives, their college careers and their futures.
Gibralter says the feedback from his peers has been positive: “College leaders need to take a stand on this and make sure we set the tone for our campuses.”
The site is expected to expand in the future, including opportunities for colleges to provide feedback and directly interact with each other.
And while it’s designed for use by school administrations and the like, Koob encourages parents of college students to check out the site.
“Take a look at it,” he says, “it is perfectly OK for them to dial up the college and say ‘are you guys doing this?’”
