U of M study: Colleges don't do enough to curb binge drinking

A new study from the University of Minnesota finds colleges across the country aren't doing enough to prevent binge drinking.

Study author Toben Nelson surveyed 351 colleges and found only half provide intervention programs for students at risk of developing problems with alcohol.

"We need to figure out how they can actually implement those kinds of interventions, what are the barriers that need to be overcome and figure out how campuses can make progress toward implementation," he said.

Nelson said only 33 percent of the colleges had worked with their local communities on efforts to reduce students' access to large amounts of cheap alcohol.

"Alcohol is easily accessible to most college students, and it's very cheap for them to get, and there are very high volumes of it," Nelson said. "That is the situation that creates problems for college students."

Almost all of the colleges in the study say they provide programs to educate students on the dangers of binge drinking. But Nelson said that on their own, those efforts don't do much to stop binge drinking.

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