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O’Malley and Johnston (2002) enlisted the CAS, Core Institute, Monitoring
the Future, National College Health Risk Behavior Survey, and National Household
Survey on Drug Abuse, to estimate levels of alcohol use among college students. In that
same year, Wechsler and Wuethrich (2002) released Dying to Drink: Confronting Binge
Drinking on College Campuses, an important book with the CAS at its core, which sums
up much of the work that has been done in the field.
From Occasional to Binge Drinking
and Beyond
Drinking in College: Who, How Much,
and How Often?
In their landmark study published in 1953, Straus and Bacon found that as
many as 74 percent of students reported drinking at least once in the past year, but only
10 percent of drinkers drank two or more times per week. For the purposes of the study,
alcohol was separated into three categories: Beer, wine, and spirits. Only five percent of
students reported usually drinking six glasses or more of wine at an average sitting, while
10 percent reported drinking six bottles or eight glasses of beer at a sitting, and about 25
percent reported drinking three or more ounces of spirits at a sitting (Straus & Bacon,
1953). The number of students who reported drinking heavily was low in comparison
with today’s students.
Those numbers pale in comparison to those found in the 2001 CAS
(Wechsler, Lee, Kuo, Seibring et al., 2002). The national survey of four-year college
students revealed that 23 percent reported drinking on 10 or more occasions in the past 30
days, and more than 40 percent of students reported binge drinking at least once in the
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