• Parents who feel that drinking is okay as long as it's not drugs, and who provide money for purchasing alcohol.

• Colleges which put tradition above common sense. (For example, one Ivy college had a traditional "streaking" day on which alcohol helped the timid act out, until the injuries outweighed the "fun." Another Ivy had a day on which students climbed a hill to revel with their six-packs.)

• Fraternities and clubs so steeped in alcohol that they have forgotten why they originally came into existence (four of five fraternity-house residents are binge drinkers).

• Ever-present bars, clubs and package stores encircling most campuses and offering lower and lower prices for larger and larger drinks. Ladies-free nights, 25-cent beer and dollar pitchers are used as marketing mechanisms.

• Returning alumni who remember and try to relive their days of "wine and roses." (College deans consider homecomings the hardest to deal with.)

Colleges must consider all of these issues, and not just focus on student norms. A lot of effort is spent persuading the binge drinkers to give up a behavior which most of them don't view as a problem. The more a student drinks, the larger the number of drinks he or she thinks it's okay to consume. The measures the College Alcohol study uses to define binge drinking--five drinks in a row for men and four for women--are scoffed at by binge drinkers: "What's five drinks, I can drink ten and still function?"

This reaction of the frequent binge drinker is shared by the International Center for Alcohol Policies, which describes itself as "supported by eleven international beverage alcohol companies." A report of this center refers to a ten-drink measure of dangerous drinking in contrast to our five-drink measure. That's one way to drastically reduce the size of the college alcohol problem: define it out of existence.

Harvard's College Alcohol Study has used the five/four drink measure because students who drink those amounts account for almost all of the alcohol problems on campus. Those who binge drink more than once a week account for only one-fifth of all college students, but consume two-thirds of all the alcohol that college students drink, an average of 14 drinks per week. They also have more than half of all the alcohol related problems on campus. At campuses where more than half of the students are binge drinkers, non-bingers are twice as likely to experience second-hand effects such as assaults, unwanted sexual advances, noise and interruptions of study time.