Pubdate: Tue, 1 May 2007 Source: Detroit Free Press (MI) Copyright: 2007 Detroit Free Press Contact: http://www.freep.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/125 Author: Kristen Jordan Shamus, Free Press Education Writer Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/pot.htm (Cannabis) Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/youth.htm (Youth) STUDENTS MAKE COLLEGEVILLE, USA, SOUND LIKE SIN CITY Listen up, parents. College students don't think you want to know how much gambling happens on campus. They really don't think you want to know about all the drinking or drug use. And more than anything, they say you'd be stunned to find out what goes on behind dorm room doors. Forty-eight percent of college students on the state's three biggest campuses say their parents would be shocked to learn how many sex partners some of their classmates have, according to The Detroit Free Press-Local 4 Michigan Poll of state college students. Some suggested that their peers have as many as five sex partners a month, while others said it's likely far fewer - two or three a year. But national studies in recent years suggest that even those estimates are too high. "I think it really depends on who the person is," said Stephen Morrison, a political science major at Michigan State University who is graduating this weekend. "There are some people who really take it more seriously than others." Morrison, 22, of Fremont said on average, most students he knows probably have two or three sex partners a year. Kristen Nevi, a 20-year-old sophomore at MSU from Plymouth, estimated that the number was much higher, saying sex on campus is an often casual thing that comes after drinking or drug use. "In a month, maybe I'd say average people hook up with about five other people," she said. Numbers may be exaggerated Sex isn't the only vice students said they're parents would be shocked to learn about. Of the 640 students surveyed at MSU, Wayne State University and the University of Michigan, 44% said the amount of illegal drug use would be shocking; 41% named alcohol use and 25% listed gambling as a shocker. The poll was conducted April 9-16 over by telephone by Selzer & Co. of Des Moines, Iowa, and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.9 percentage points. But should news that college students are having sex, drinking and doing drugs be all that shocking to parents? Some moms and dads of the current crop of college kids were students themselves when a 1969 Gallup Poll was done surveying attitudes toward premarital sex and illegal drug use. At the time, 2 out of 3 college students said it wasn't wrong to have sex before marriage, and 1-in-5 students said they had tried marijuana, and many told pollsters they used the drug as readily as they drank beer. A 2005 study in the Journal of American College Health suggests that boasting might lead students today to think their friends have more sex partners than they really do. The study found that 86% of college students said they had one or no sex partners in the previous school year, but only 22% guessed that the same was true for their classmates. Binge drinking most troubling Susan Foster, vice president and director of policy research at the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, said the sense that alcohol and drug abuse - along with the casual sex that typically follows those behaviors - are considered part of the college experience. "People look the other way, telling them it may be a right of passage, when in fact nothing could be farther from the truth," Foster said. Foster, whose center's most recent study, "Wasting the Best and Brightest," surveyed 2,000 college students about drinking and drug-use habits, and found that binge drinking is a growing problem. "I think one of the things that was most shocking to us was despite the fact that there's been a lot of attention to the problem of substance abuse on college campuses.we've actually seen an intensifying of this type of behavior among college students," Foster said of the study, which was published in March. "There are consequences we haven't thought about - increased chance of risky sex, brain damage, accidents, increased link to mental health problems, depression, anxiety, suicide and even homicide," Foster said. "These problems spill out from the college campuses to the surrounding communities." Gambling on campus Jason Cupples, 20, of Berkley, a second-year student at Wayne State majoring in computer science, said he wasn't surprised that 44% of college students said their parents would be shocked to learn about the illegal drug use on college campuses. Even though Wayne State is a commuter school with a high percentage of older and returning students, it's not humdrum. "There's plenty of partying going on," he said. "It's the college life to do all of that stuff." Nathan Cramton, 20, a junior studying screen arts and culture at U-M, said parents wouldn't find it shocking that college students drink or have sex or do drugs. Rather, he said, they'd probably be surprised by how much gambling happens on the Ann Arbor campus. "It's kind of accepted as normal. It's always kind of laughed off as not really a problem," he said, adding that card games and sports gambling consume a lot of students' time. "Especially at a school like U-M, which while it has strong academics, it also has very strong athletics," he said. - --- MAP posted-by: Steve Heath