Slippery Rock University ranked seventh for on-campus alcohol arrests in a listing of the top 50 colleges in the country in 2011, according to a recently published survey led by Jon Millard of rehabs.com.
According to Millard, Rehabs.com is a company that seeks to bring alcohol and drug related problems and abuse across the country to the attention of the public. He said they aim to help abusers find the treatment they need.
Shippensburg, Bloomsberg, and West Chester, three other schools in the Pennsylvania Association of State Schools and Higher Education, were also ranked in the top 10 and ranked above SRU for on-campus alcohol arrests, according to the survey.
Millard said this study is conducted to sort out colleges with severe drug and alcohol problems. He said the hope is that the results will add to the debating of drug and alcohol problems on college campuses and the results will be used as the evidence to this debate.
The data was obtained using crime reports to a database managed by the Office of Post-Secondary Education for schools with more than 5,000 students enrolled to ensure that the results were not skewed in the direction of colleges with low student population.
“The results are a reflection of on-campus crime activity that took place in the past,” Millard said. “It’s therefore quite possible that things could swing in the other direction for SRU and may have already done so in the last year. Time will tell.”
The recently released 2012 results, according to the Office of Post-Secondary Education database, indicate a drop in rank to the 16th highest in on-campus alcohol arrests for SRU, eight spots lower than the seventh spot reported in the survey from the 2011 data.
Miller explained that the study stands to reason that almost all U.S. college campuses will have drug and alcohol issues and it is important to remember that a higher reported rate of arrests does not mean that a particular college has the worst drug scene. It could indicate that the campus has an exceptionally diligent police force that misses almost nothing.
“This is the first time we have ranked colleges by their drug arrests in this way, so it’s hard to say how SRU specifically has ranked in the past,” Millard said. “As a somewhat reliable, but probably still anecdotal and selective reference, College Prowler gives SRU a B- on drug safety based on reports by SRU students. However, it seems to be far from the worst for drug culture on its campus, despite its ranking in position number seven on our list.”
“This analysis was strictly an unbiased look at what the hard figures suggest about per capita crime rates,” Millard said. “The hows and whys of campus drug culture are a much more complex issue, involving lots of other geographical and social factors. We see the study as a jumping off point for more discussion and debate–an extra resource that can be marshaled by colleges in the fight against systemic drug crime on campus grounds.”
