nationwide to determine levels of drinking among college students. Despite the expected differences in sampling procedures, statistical analyses, and definitions of drinking among these studies, certain trends in drinking patterns among college students can be identified.
Early studies from the 1930s through the 1950s including Straus and Bacon’s nationwide survey, reported that the proportion of college students who were drinkers ranged from 56 to 95 percent (2-6). During the 1960s and early 1970s, several studies described regional variation in collegiate drinking (7-13). Among the findings were these:
68 percent of women and 62 percent of men from a western university drank.
58 percent of freshman and 88 percent of seniors at a midwestern university had used alcohol.
68 percent of students from a southern university were drinkers.
91 percent of students from a large eastern State university system used alcohol.
Several national studies of college students’ drinking patterns were conducted in the late 1960s and early 1970s. These studies reported that approximately 80 percent of college students drank (14, 15). In one of the studies (15) it was also found that more than 50 percent of students reported either having a hangover or driving after drinking during the previous 12 months.
Further research in the late 1970s reported on prevalence of heavy drinking and problems related to drinking among college students. Among the New England college students, 29 percent of the men and 11 percent of the women were classified as heavy drinkers (16), and among these students, more than half reported problems related to drinking, such as blackouts, fighting, and trouble with authorities (17). Strange and Schmidt (18) found that 92 percent of the students at the University of Iowa drank and that self-identified problem drinkers were more likely to experience problems related to their drinking than were nonproblem drinkers. (See Blane and Hewitt [19] for a comprehensive review of the literature of college student drinking patterns through the 1970s.)
Interest in college drinking has continued into the 1980s. At least 11 surveys (20-30) at individual universities and States have been conducted trough 1984. From these surveys, estimates of the proportion of drinkers among college students ranged from 80 percent for the University of South Florida (22) to 99 percent for a private college in western New York (21).
On the national level, two surveys (31, 32) conducted in 1982-83 and 1984-85 found little change over the study period in three measures of student drinking: proportion of drinkers, of heavy drinkers, and having hangovers or driving after drinking. Only the proportion of students reporting vomiting, drinking while driving, or driving after they knew they had drunk too much, had changed from approximately 25 percent in 1982-83 to more than 40 percent in 1984-85.
On the international level, various studies (33-35) report similar proportions of drinkers among students in Australia (85 percent). Oxford University (82 percent), and Scotland (87 percent).
Longitudinal Studies
From the early 1970s through the mid-1980s, several longitudinal studies (31, 36-41) have exam-