How to Curb Binge Drinking at U.S. Colleges: Sell Alcohol on Campus.

Source: Shavin, Naomi. "How to Curb Binge Drinking at U.S. Colleges: Sell Alcohol on Campus." New Republic. N.p., 16 Dec. 2014. Web. 18 Nov. 2015.

Summary: This article was written in response to The New York Times’ article, “Why Colleges Haven’t Stopped Drinking,” due to the fact that the article missed something that could help fix the drinking problem, having a bar on campus.

The article provides several examples as to why having a bar on campus could work and how it could prevent drinking related accidents. These include DUIs and DUI-related student deaths could decrease dramatically,  drinks being less susceptible to spiking and drugging, which could reduce incidents of sexual assault on campus, keeping students closer to a hospital if medical care is needed, bartender hired by the school would be incentivized to cut off students who are too intoxicated, Student groups could hold events at campus bars rather than off campus, Schools with campus bars could monitor students’ drinking habits and create more effective alcohol education programming.

Quality: This article addresses many of the problems related to alcohol related accidents and backs up its data with reputable sources such as from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA). The NIAAA is a branch of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Resources which is sponsored by the United States Government. This leads us to believe that the article's statistics are valid and reputable.

Issues: This article bases some of its reasons off of personal experiences they had at a school in London where the author states "the drinking age is 18". Therefor separating it from the US. Also the author says that they had to wait in a line to even get in the door of this off campus bar, saying "the wait to get into one of the campus bars—Guy’s Bar—was almost always over an hour." (Shavin). Many students are not going to want to wait in a line to get into the bar when they could get into a party and get a drink almost immediately.    

Key Words:

binge drinking

on-campus bar

DUI

drinking related accidents

controlled environment
incentivized