A stone cold sober report

John Katzman, the chief executive officer of The Princeton Review, expressed some frustrations to us during a visit last year. His company, which is not related to Princeton University, publishes an annual set of rankings to help students and parents choose from among 351 colleges and universities.

The publication ranks schools in a number of categories, including seemingly important ones having to do with academic excellence, the biggest bang for the buck and the best on-campus library. And yet only one set of categories — those having to do with partying and elicit drug use — gets national attention. Typically, the school that makes it to the top of these rankings tries to discredit the report or says the Princeton Review is being irresponsible to publish it.

Brigham Young University is never one to complain. That is because, with impressive consistency, it always ranks as the most "stone cold sober" school in the land, as well as the campus on which students pray the most on a regular basis. This year, BYU also ranked a more-than-respectable second in the "best quality of life" category and third for the best college library, sandwiched between such notable institutions as Harvard and Dartmouth. Considering the school's emphasis on academic and moral excellence, those are impressive rankings, indeed.

But the party-school category got all the attention. BYU was at one end of the spectrum. The University of Colorado was at the other.

We're not naive as to why this happens. Neither is Katzman, by the way. But we hope the way the top partying schools react each year is an indication that the nation is beginning to take the problem of campus binge-drinking seriously. Studies show that between 40 percent and 50 percent of all college students drink to excess. This causes many deaths each year, in addition to serious injuries, car accidents, sexual assaults and date rapes.

Schools and the communities around them have tried to come to grips with this problem in many ways. Typically, however, they run smack into the alcohol industry itself, which is the No. 1 culprit in promoting what has become a culture of alcohol at many schools, in contrast to the culture that surely promotes the opposite behavior at BYU.

Alcohol industry ad campaigns target young drinkers. New products, such as sweet-tasting alco-pop drinks, are geared toward college-age kids, many of whom are too young to drink legally.