Story #1 College Life Study: Observing Patterns in Collegiate Drug Use

Zack Cohen

College Life Study

For many students, college has become a time during which substance use is highly prevalent, according to one study. In an effort to understand the drug use patterns among college students The College Life Study took a unique look at the prevalence of collegiate substance use and its long-term effects.

“Substance abuse in college is not just a right of passage or something we should accept as normal,” said the College Life Study project director Kimberly Caldeira. “We think that we can do better than that as a society.”

The College Life Study was divided up into several subsections, each observing the results and habits related to the use of different substances throughout a subject’s first three years in college.

“There have been very few longitudinal studies on college students over the years,” said Caldeira, “most studies of drug use had focused on high risk populations like adolescents in disadvantaged urban settings so there was very little information on the higher achieving kind of population like college students.”

One area of research that was specifically observed was the amount of college kids that have substance use problems and to what extent these individuals sought professional help. Caldeira and her colleagues at the University of Maryland used personal interviews to assess a sample of 946 students over a three-year period.

“The interview face-to-face contact just made the process more personal and kept the participants motivated to stay with us over time,” said Caldeira. “The interview allowed us to get more detailed information and gave us the opportunity to engage the participants in more of a dialogue.”

Using standardized questionnaires and criteria set by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-IV, the researchers found that 47 percent of all third year students used alcohol and/or marijuana with such a high frequency that they qualified as having a substance use disorder at one point in their college career.

The table below illustrates the way in which researchers qualified each subject’s level of substance use.

Table 1

Comparison of baseline characteristics of included and excluded participants.

	Included (n=946)		Excluded (n=307)
	% (n)	Mean (SD)	% (n)	Mean (SD)
Sex (% male)	46.0 (435)		56.4 (173)*
Race (% White)	71.2 (674)		68.7 (211)
Alcohol use characteristics a
DSM-IV Status b
Dependence	16.1 (140)		15.3 (42)
Abuse	12.2 (106)		16.1 (44)
Diagnostic orphan c	40.5 (351)		39.1 (107)
Non-problematic	31.1 (270)		29.6 (81)
Typical number of drinks/drinking day		4.8 (2.6)		5.2 (3.0)*
Past-year frequency of drinking		50.8 (48.1)		58.3 (54.7)*
Age first drank alcohol		14.7 (2.3)		14.6 (2.5)
Marijuana use characteristics d
DSM-IV Status b
Dependence	9.2 (53)		12.6 (22)
Abuse	15.6 (90)		9.2 (16)
Diagnostic orphan c	12.5 (72)		15.5 (27)
Non-problematic	62.8 (363)		62.6 (109)
Past-year frequency of use		35.2 (64.2)		47.5 (81.1)*
Age first used marijuana		16.0 (1.5)		15.9 (1.7

Despite the high rates of problematic heavy drinking and drug use, an important contribution of this study is the finding that only four percent of the sampled college students who qualified as having a substance use disorder perceived a need for help with their substance use problems.Basically, most of the students who had substance use problems did not even recognize the fact that they had a problem.

The Graph below illustrates how many students fall into the each level of alcohol use.

“What these findings tell us is that we need to do more research on methods for intervening with students who have an emerging alcohol problem and look into what kinds of screening methods health providers and campus administrators can utilize to help,” said Caldeira.

Caldeira added that future researchers should use the data collected in the College Life Study related to social pressures for insight into some potential solutions to help identify the students who have a serious substance use problems.

The study found that help-seeking amongst substance use disorder cases was rare overall, but was significantly elevated amongst individuals who perceived a need to seek help or experienced social pressures from parents, friends, or another person. These findings highlight the opportunity for early intervention and tell us that an increase in social pressure could help more students realize the extent of their substance use.