A new platform to help college administrators make informed decisions about how to address student drinking and the health and security issues it may cause was announced Tuesday by the National Institutes of Health.

The platform — CollegeAIM (Alcohol Intervention Matrix) — will be available as a guide and online. CollegeAIM is a synthesis of at least 60 alcohol-related interventions ranked according to factors such as effectiveness and costs, according to an NIH press release.

The platform is designed for college administrators and staff to make science-based decisions to resolve issues that result from student drinking, such as health problems and safety risks.

“It’s simple, it’s easy, it’s comprehensive and the information is credible and completely trustworthy,” said Jonathan Gibralter, the president of Wells College and the chair of a working group focused on combating harmful and underage drinking, during a teleconference on Tuesday.

Representatives of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, the subset of NIH that created CollegeAIM, emphasized the importance of using the platform to address binge drinking among college students. Binge drinking is defined for women as the ingestion of four drinks in a two-hour period and for men, the ingestion of five drinks in this period, said NIAAA Director George Koob.

Almost half of college students binge drink every month, posing a risk for injury, sexual assault and even death, Gibralter said.

In addition to the prevention of binge drinking, the platform is aimed at combating regular long-term drinking among students, which Koob said “can affect cognitive behavioral functioning even into adulthood. Gibralter added that the platform will also help students who suffer from disrupted study and lack of sleep due to other students’ alcohol habits, and prevent students from becoming victims of alcohol-related incidents.

Gibralter said CollegeAIM is useful because it is clear and easy to understand and facilitates instructions for alcohol-based interventions. He added that some of the best researchers on alcohol consumption prevention spent two years evaluating which intervention methods would be the most effective.

“College officials have numerous options for addressing alcohol issues, but they’re not all equally effective … They often don’t know what to do,” Gibralter said.

The interventions are targeted toward individual students, campus environments and student bodies as a whole, said Koob. The interventions are sorted into three tiers based on their effectiveness, and are also evaluated for cost, potential barriers and other criteria, he added.

“Choosing our interventions wisely, with help of CollegeAIM, boosts our success,” Gibralter said.

Colleges and universities will be able to use a combination of approaches to meet the needs of their campus and budget through the website, and learn how current strategies compare to older ones, Koob said.

The NIAAA will mail a CollegeAIM guide to every college and university president in the U.S. next week, according to a representative of the organization.

Published on September 22, 2015 at 9:26 pm

Contact Alexa: atorrens@syr.edu