The alcohol-related death of a student on the Ball State campus over the weekend seemed like a rare event, but it's part of a larger pattern that includes hundreds of alcohol fatalities across the nation.
A study sponsored by the National Institutes of Health found that alcohol-related deaths among U.S. college students rose from 1,440 in 1998 to 1,825 in 2005, the most recent year for which data was available. An average of 35 college-aged people die every week from alcohol-related causes.
"These are tragically and unacceptably high figures that indicate an urgent need for colleges and surrounding communities to implement evidence-based prevention and counseling programs," Dr. Ralph Hingson, director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, said in the report.
The results demonstrate the wide range of the individual- group- and community-level approaches that can influence student behavior and challenge the culture of college drinking, he said.
Ruth C. Engs, professor emeritus at Indiana University and author of Alcohol and other Drugs: Self-responsibility, has studied behaviors based on university students' drinking patterns. Engs has joined others who say the way to curb binge drinking is actually to lower the drinking age.
In 2008, about 100 university heads, including Butler University President Bobby Fong, signed a petition urging lawmakers to begin a discussion about lowering the drinking age to 18. Ball State was not among the universities supporting the petition, but the debate reached campus when 343 people gathered to hear a drinking age reform panel, called "Responsible Drinking Redefined," at John R. Emens Auditorium.
Engs said that the current age barrier for alcohol consumption is counterproductive and a misguided effort.
"The current law is not working and it's being flaunted across the country," Engs said. "If people are flaunting one law, then they're probably flaunting another."
Engs is a proponent of lowering the drinking age as long as it is in "controlled environments," such as restaurants, campus bars, university-sponsored events or when accompanied by parents. She said that being in a public place, rather then a private, unsupervised one, is a better environment for drinking.
"That pressures people not to get rowdy [when drinking]," Engs said. "If you drink too much in a restaurant, you'll probably get kicked out."
The NIH study found an increase of drinking-related accidental deaths among 18-24 year-old students, most which were the result of traffic-related incidents. The researchers found that more students were binge drinking, having five or more alcoholic drinks on any occasion. This rate rose from 42 percent to 45 percent, and those who admitted to drinking and driving in the past year increased from 26.5 percent to 29 percent, according to the study.
Sarah Dalton, a senior English education major at Ball State, said freshmen students tend to get a little "crazy" with alcohol the first couple months in school. At 2 a.m. Sunday, she experienced the issue firsthand when a young man stumbled out into the road in front of her car, then vomited in the street.
"He didn't even look across the street before he crossed," Dalton said, who slowed up when she noticed a group of students crossing the McKinley toward the Johnson and LaFollette complexes. "If I had been going the speed limit, that could've been bad."
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