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.
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