The five-four measure is not intended to diagnose students on college campuses as alcoholics, nor to determine if they are legally intoxicated at the time. It is not linked to the time elapsed while drinking, the weight of the drinker, or food eaten during the drinking episode. The measure is designed to track how many students on college campuses nationwide are drinking at levels high enough to significantly increase the risk of problems for themselves and for those around them. Highlighting that measure without considering its relationship to alcohol-related problems is naive and misses the point. Students' own opinions toward binge drinking and how to define it appear to support our view.
College students know more about campus drinking than most people realize.
Students estimated that 35 percent of all undergraduates binge drink-not far from the actual 44 percent reported in our surveys and by other national researchers. When the students' estimates were grouped by institution, those estimates were generally accurate for 6 of 10 institutions. Students' own drinking habits determine whether they perceive that alcohol abuse is a problem at their institution. A majority of those who abstained from drinking, or who did not binge, considered alcohol use to be an issue at their campuses. Conversely, a minority of binge drinkers considered it to be an issue, and frequent binge drinkers were least likely to do so.