396: #1 Party School

Ira Glass

One of the producers of our radio show, Sarah Koenig, moved to a college town because her husband got a job teaching there. And by day, her neighborhood is like a college town that you would see in an old Hollywood film. Beautiful professors' homes built in the '20s and '30s. Tree-lined streets. Gardens.

But by night, we'd been on her porch for five minutes when--

Ira Glass

It's nine students walking down the middle of the street. Happens all the time.

Six minutes later, there's another group of drunk students. One tosses something onto a lawn.

Ira Glass

Five minutes after that, we hear this clattering from the alley that runs next to Sarah's house.

Ira Glass

We run down the alley. Two college boys run away as they see us coming. Don't go back there, you could get raped, they yell to Sarah.

Ira Glass

12 minutes after that, from the other direction, we hear a scraping and a loud rumbling, I guess.

Ira Glass

I don't know how many street signs you need to hear dragged through your neighborhood before you can recognize the sound it makes from all the way around the corner, but apparently my colleague Sarah has seen whatever that number is. We go to investigate and find two guys.

Ira Glass

Of course, this story makes no sense at all. I inform the two guys that I don't need to know their names.

Ira Glass

Seems like kind of an academic distinction to me, but.

With that, the other guy starts running with the street sign toward Garner Street, which is hard, because it's attached to a seven foot metal pole, and it's heavy. Sarah and I go back around the corner to her front yard. The evening is not over at all. Just in time to spot another student, this one coming out of a garden. Sarah assumes from the bushes back there.

Ira Glass

He goes. And it's not a minute later that Sara points toward the alley, where there are three girls in miniskirts, under a streetlight, fully visible.

Ira Glass

One girl hikes up her skirt.

Ira Glass

Sarah's caught other groups of girls peeing in that same spot. Once she heard a girl say, "This is a good place. I go here all the time."

Ira Glass

The college town that Sarah lives in is State College, Pennsylvania, home of Penn State University, which this year was named the number one party school in the country by the people who name the number one party school, the Princeton Review. And this is apparently what it means to be the number one party school. From the moment that Sarah and I turned on the tape recorder to the moment that she sent those girls looking for somebody else's yard to pee in, it's only been 34 minutes. It's 1:30 in the morning.

Ira Glass

The Princeton Review chooses the number one party school from online student surveys. 120,000 students at 371 schools around the country answered these questions. "How widely used are beer, alcohol, marijuana, and other drugs at your school?" "How big is frat life at your school?" And finally, "How many hours do you study each day?"

Students aren't randomly selected, so it's not, strictly speaking, a scientific survey. But the last two years, Penn State has done very well. It was the number three party school last year, number six the year before that, and nobody argues it is not a very big school for partying.

Ira Glass

The University's president, Graham Spanier, discussed the number one ranking in a faculty senate meeting this fall. The only recording that exist is from a webcast Penn State did at the meeting, so you hear the audio is little sketchy. But still fine.

Ira Glass

The amount of drinking at the school does concern Spanier. He told the faculty that when people ask him what's the biggest problem at Penn State, they always expect him to say money, but the answer for a long time has been alcohol.

And he said it's a problem that's bigger than Penn State. Nearly a third of high school seniors across the country binge drink.

Ira Glass

Well, today we devote our entire show to the nation's number one party school. Not because it's number one and what happens here is unusual, but because it's not unusual at all. Lots of schools, especially a lot of big state schools, do this much partying.

Five of us from our staff went down to State College where Sarah lives to record one football weekend in November. What we bring you today is a travelogue from this place where the rules and norms are probably very different from where you live right now. Its own rituals, its own jargon, its own native dress. We wanted to see what it was all about.

Our show today, in four acts. Only three of them actually pre-soaked in vodka. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One. I'm Not As Think As You Drunk I Am.

Let's start with the drinking, which is epic. The Harvard School of Public Health did a study of what schools tend to have the heaviest drinking, and Penn State actually hits all the criteria that they found. It's located in the northeast, and it has a large undergraduate population-- that would be, in this case, 44,000 students-- a large fraternity system, a nationally-known football team.

Now, the fact is that it probably doesn't hurt it's isolated. State College is in a valley nestled between two mountain ridges in a state forest. People here call it "Happy Valley." It's surrounded by farms. You're in the middle of nowhere, a few people said, without much to do but drink.

Ira Glass

At tailgate parties, you see just how deeply embedded drinking is in life at Penn State. It's entire families. It's several generations together. It's outdoor, public drinking, which gives you the feeling, when you're there, that the whole world is drinking. Probably because there's so much of it.

Penn State now has the largest stadium in North America. It holds over 100,000 people. The tailgates are these huge masses of humanity, spread out as far as you can see, all around the stadium. Starting at eight in the morning, starting really early, which is when these alums got here. They talked to one of our producers, Aaron Scott.

Ira Glass

Eight in the morning means, by the way, that if it's a night game, they will tailgate for 12 hours, in the cold, in the freezing cold sometimes, before kickoff.

Ira Glass

Usually pounding down drinks at eight in the morning can be kind of, I don't know, bad. But the main thing about this kind of drinking, where it's tied in with tradition, and football, and family, and overwhelming sense of school spirit, is that it feels incredibly wholesome. The whole campus feels like a Chevy commercial. Welcoming, people friendly. [UNINTELLIGIBLE]

The sense that drinking together is what we do spills over from the football games into the whole weekend. Into the week, too, actually. It's Friday night, it's the night before the football game, outside East Hall, the big freshman dorms. Dozens of kids are lined up for free shuttle buses that are going to take them across campus to the frats and parties on the other side.

Two of our producers, Jane Feltes and Lisa Pollak, noticed that all the girls wore these ratty-looking hoodies and jackets over their dressup clothes. Somebody else told them support for this is "fracket," and wanted some girls to confirm that.

Ira Glass

Jane rode on the bus with the freshmen. She joins me now.

Ira Glass

Penn State's administration does a pretty thorough job surveying students to track how much they're drinking. The surveys show that every Friday and every Saturday night, 75% of the school drinks. That's over 30,000 people, an average of four and a half drinks per person. And the students drink those drinks in about three hours average.

To put those numbers in perspective, binge drinking, or as it's being re-branded lately, high risk or dangerous drinking, defined as four drinks for a woman or five drinks for a man consumed in just two hours.

[SINGING]

When you get down into the details of Penn State's numbers, it works out to over half the students regularly binge drinking, which is just a little bit above the national average for college students.

[SINGING]

The routine at Penn State on weekend nights is that you pregame or preload. That's what they call it when you drink at your apartment or your dorm room before going out. It's way cheaper than buying drinks at a bar. Also in winter, keeps you warm. We heard lots of people use the phrase "beer jacket."

And if you went to college long ago, you definitely noticed mostly hard liquor here, not beer. Various sugary vodka drinks of various kinds. Red bull and vodka, one of them. So everybody gets a lot more drunk.

Ira Glass

But college students are underage, so a lot, maybe most, of drinking at Penn State is underage drinking. The bars in State College are actually very strict about under 21 drinking. You have to show a student ID. In lots of places they scan the ID. But there are other ways to get drunk. Everybody told us if you're too young for a bar, you go to a frat party.

Ira Glass

Thursday night. This is the front door of a fraternity that asked that I not use their name. Under Penn State rules, nobody is supposed to get into a frat party except members of other fraternities and sororities, and guys on an official university list of potential pledges. There's supposed to be a guest list with names at the door. But in practice, it seems like pretty much any cute girl can get onto that guest list on the spot. Which is one reason they all wear the miniskirts, one girl told us. To help with that.

Ira Glass

This particular girl, though, had a guy with her that the brothers did not want to let in.

Ira Glass

He's not in a frat, so under school rules, he should not be let in. But the guys at the door are no match for this girl.

Ira Glass

And another young drinker finds haven.

Inside the windows are taped over with plastic trash bags, which gives the whole place the feeling of a seedy underground club. One big room is dark with a DJ and a big sound system, dancing. Another room has booze. The floor of this room is slippery with a layer of muck that is part beer, part dirt, part, you know.

There's a lot of flirting. Much of it ineffective. I walked up to one couple who told me they'd been talking for half an hour.

Ira Glass

The whole time we were at Penn State, I found myself looking back and forth between two opposite feelings about all the drinking I saw going on. Sometimes it seemed really extreme. Other times it seemed like, so what. Kids drink at college. Most of them get through it. Lots of students said something that was hard argue with. When else are they going to get a chance to do this? Like I was talking to a senior by the back door of the fraternity about this and that.

Ira Glass

It's also not hard to find students who talk about the darker side of all this partying. A senior named Dan was out late one of these weekend nights, not drinking, but watching drunk people and taking notes for a paper that he's writing. He decided to quit his fraternity after his sophomore year because he was falling so far behind in the school work. His frat threw parties not two, not three, but four nights a week, which is typical here.

Ira Glass

In the surveys of students done by the school, a fourth of Penn State students say that drinking has caused them to miss class get behind with their school work. 15% say they've been pushed, hit, or assaulted. 7% said drinking lead to an unwanted sexual experience. 6% said they'd gotten into what you would call a real, physical fight. And there are crimes that you never hear of unless you live in a place like State College.

Ira Glass

This is a long time State College resident named Nina White. And the man on the bed, of course, was a college student who committed a surprisingly common crime in this town. He came to her house drunk, found a comfortable place, and fell asleep.

Because of incidents like this, the population at Penn State who seem the most exercised about student drinking right now is local residents who live near the students. They've been organizing and trying to pass new laws. Some of them admit that dealing with so many drunk kids so many months in a row has turned them into something that they are not proud to be. One neighbor, Laird Jones, told me he knows it's driving him a little batty.

Ira Glass

Glaird lives right in the middle of the fraternities, right on the same block. And he puts up with so much noise, and so many kids kicking in his fence, and drenching his yard with pee, and so many incidents with bloody kids, injured kids, kids who are high, parties next door with hundreds of kids that wouldn't end, then he delivered these all like a series of the macabre one-liners in the most disturbing stand-up act ever. Sample?

Ira Glass

That buzzing, of course, was the motion-activated sensors pointed at his yard.

For now, anyway, most of the students seem to go to classes, get an education, and drink pretty happily. And the people who are learning something, and changing, and making resolutions because of the drinking so far mostly seem to be the neighbors.

Coming up-- why delivery guys don't like to deliver Buffalo wings in State College, Pennsylvania. Also--

[GROWL]

Thank you, mountain lion. Have we mentioned that the name of the football team is the Nittany Lions? I know a lot of you knew that anyway. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our show, of course, we choose a theme, bring you different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, "#1 Party School." We spent a football weekend at Penn State University to see life at one of the big partying state schools. We have now arrived at Act Two.

Act Two. "If God Isn't a Penn State Fan, Then Why is The Sky Blue and White."

All of our names today, by the way, are things seen on bumper stickers, T-shirts, and shot glasses in the State College area.

One of the ways that the town of State College is actually an unusual, special place, its own little kind of cultural ecosystem, like a little microclimate in the middle of Pennsylvania, is that because of the University, it is in only county in the state whose GDP grew in 2008. It also has the lowest unemployment rate of any county in the state.

Part of this prosperity is because the University is growing. Enrollment is up, even during the recession. But one member of our staff, Nancy Updike, spent a few days going around to area businesses, and she found that they have adapted to the very specialized needs of the nation's number one party school. Here's what you learned.

Nancy Updike

Here are six tips for running a business in State College, PA. Six tips, all kinds of businesses, with supporting illustrations. Tip one. Keep up.

This is McLanahan's, a sprawling Hearst Castle of a store. It's your basic drugstore- deli- produce market- hardware- underwear- beer pong- stationary- grocery- Penn State merchandise emporium, which over the years has acquired and absorbed the stores that used to be next to it to the point where it's bought up everything it can, and the only way left to expand is to cram more stuff everywhere. And there's always something clamoring for more space.

McLanahan's owner Ray Agostinelli says that over and over again, he's had to stock way up on some usually sleepy object that has suddenly become a crazy hot seller.

Nancy Updike

And then there are the crazes that never go away. Sex. One of the McLanahan's many frank and non-judgmental offerings is its display right out front that is condoms on top, lubricant in the middle, pregnancy tests on the bottom.

Ray takes me into one of the two Penn State merchandise sections of the store. It's a full sensory experience. That's a CD of the school's band in the background. There seven different kinds of car air fresheners with the Penn State logo, pacifiers, a steering wheel cover.

Nancy Updike

In the almost 50 years Ray has been working at McLanahan's-- he bought it from Bob McLanahan 40 years ago-- Ray has seen the Penn State merchandise in his store go from almost an afterthought, maybe one rack of sweatshirts, to being a third of his business. The only downside is--

Nancy Updike

Ray says if Penn State loses one football game, sales of Penn State merch at McLanahan's go down 20%. Not for a day, for a week. And sometimes even longer, until the next winning game.

Which brings us to Marrara's, the dry cleaner up the street. Just about every business owner and employee I talked to said business was significantly down because of Penn State's loss to Ohio State the week before. But at the dry cleaner, no mention of this. Parties happen every weekend, win or lose, and that means some people will end up talking to Roberta at Marrara's, who after 18 years at the store is functionally psychic.

Nancy Updike

In case anyone's wondering, women students usually bring the vomit, male students the urine, animal or otherwise.

So second tip. Apply the smell test.

Third tip. When it's late, simplify.

Every Friday and Saturday night after midnight, when the drink specials at the bars are over, Canyon Pizza starts getting a loud, amped-up line of students down the block. The business model at Canyon Pizza is straight-up, no-frills genius. Slices are a dollar a piece. After 11 PM, it's cheese only. And every time the pretty women behind the counter get a tip, they hit a giant tip gong.

Canyon Pizza also delivers until four in the morning on weekends, and the deliveries are a whole separate world, deserving their own business tip. So tip four-- be aware of fists and wings.

One of the delivery guys is Alex Moore. He's going on a run in his black Saturn Ion, which was new when he started doing deliveries almost three years ago, but it's taking some abuse after being parked in front of Canyon Pizza and its nighttime crowds weekend after weekend.

Nancy Updike

Alex stops to deliver a pizza. Actually two extra larges and pepperoni rolls. He says he's never had a drink in his life. Just not interested.

Alex is 22. He's studying game simulation and computer programming at DeVry online. Look closely at his hoodie. It's Pac-Man.

Pizza delivery has been a good job while he's finishing up his degree. The only food Alex says he doesn't like to deliver is wings. Canyon Pizza has a sister store, Canyon Wings, and Alex says that mysteriously, people don't tip for wings. He says most of the time he gets a dollar or nothing at all. Just stiffed.

Nancy Updike

Tip five. Keep it cheap.

In Pennsylvania, beer is only sold in certain stores. It's not sold in grocery stores, and it's not sold in the places that sell liquor and wine. This is just how Pennsylvania does things. It's been this way since the end of Prohibition.

So Paul Pletcher owns Pletcher's, one of the beer stores in State College. It's a family business. Paul's father lured him away from teaching middle school math. And over the last 15 years or so, Paul has witnessed a strange trend in student drinking-- the ascendance, and eventual dominance, of light beer. As Paul remembers it, it went from Coors Light to Miller Lite to Bud Light and now--

Nancy Updike

Natural Light, aka Natty Light, is way beyond "very popular" among Penn State students. It laps every other beer. Even though apparently no one likes it, including the students at Pletcher's who are buying it.

Nancy Updike

Only in college can you show up with a beer your friends know is bad and still be a hero. Natty Light's sole virtue-- this is according to its own customers-- is that it's cheap. $16.50 a case at Pletcher's. No one, not a single person I talked to, liked the taste.

Nancy Updike

This group of students said that at their party and tailgate, they would have the six cases of Natty Light they were buying, plus another favorite drink, Jungle Juice, which is also--

Nancy Updike

Did you catch that? He said, if there was a drunk button--

Just for the record, if it'd been available, I would have used the drunk button in college.

Tip six. Like your customers.

There's a bar just up the street from Canyon Pizza called The Brewery. It's a dive. Literally. It's in a basement. The main owner is Ray Rocky who grew up in Pennsylvania and went to Penn State undergrad and grad school. He started tending bar as a student.

Nancy Updike

Ray says there are many reasons for this tectonic change in student drinking habits. He says beer is at a disadvantage at the University generally since Penn State banned kegs at fraternities, dorms, and tailgates.

And Ray says in his experience, promotional reps for liquors like Bacardi or Captain Morgan do a lot more on-site promotions, giving away T-shirts and such, than beer labels do. And the promotions work. They push sales toward liquor.

There's also lots of liquor now that's flavored-- more fruit punch than bourbon. And Ray says the 21 year olds he sees in his bar seem to come in already much more used to drinking liquor than beer. It mixes well with soda or red bull, and it's easier to hide.

Nancy Updike

The result of more liquor and less beer, according to Ray?

Nancy Updike

So Ray does see students getting what he calls "stupid drunk." But most don't do that, he says. Like a lot of the business owners I talked to, Ray likes that the students are having a good time. He likes the students, period.

Ira Glass

Nancy Updike.

Ira Glass

Act Three. Talk to the Paw.

In 2009, the same year Penn State was ranked the number one party school in the country, the town of State College was ranked the safest metropolitan area in the country by Congressional Quarterly. Murder and other serious crimes are almost nonexistent.

But as you've heard, of course, that doesn't mean that the streets are quiet. There's so much activity that 47% of the town's budget go into police services, which is high for a town this size. On the Saturday night that we were in town, 24 officers were on duty patrolling in cars, on bikes, on foot. And that's just to cover the town. The University has its own police force patrolling the campus. One of our producers, Aaron Scott, rode along with one of the town's officers for the night shift.

Aaron Scott

Officer Martin Hanes tells me the job's all about repetition. From 10 to 12, students start flooding the streets. From 12 to 2, he deals with loud parties, fake IDs, and underage drinking.

Aaron Scott

Drunk kid in the house. That's what you heard about earlier on the show, where some drunken student stumbles into, if not breaks into, a stranger's house.

Aaron Scott

Arrest for public drunkenness and underage drinking have increased 5% this fall. Officer Hanes blames the number one party school ranking, at least in part. Students see it as a national title they have to defend.

Aaron Scott

So it's 12:30, and the bouncer outside Indigo, the town's biggest dance club, flags us down. He says a guy tried to pass off a license that wasn't his, and then fled into a hotel two doors down.

Aaron Scott

The bouncer leads us into the hotel and up the stairs to a bar. He checks the bathroom and says the guy's inside. We all go in and find him standing alone at a urinal.

Aaron Scott

Officer Hanes is generally pretty nice to the students, but because the kid ran and is now lying, he switched over to hardass cop.

Aaron Scott

Officer Hanes takes him out of the hotel and puts him in the car. Then, because the cop car sometimes riles up the crowd in front of the club, Officer Hanes drives down the block and pulls into a parking lot to write up the guy. I'll call them Nick. He's skinny, clean cut, and despite his initial denial, he caves quickly and cooperates.

Aaron Scott

In the middle of writing the citation, Officer Hanes looks up and stops.

Aaron Scott

A guy in a hoodie just walked into a parking lot on the other side of the alley.

Aaron Scott

Officer Hanes has been at this for three and a half years. He knows where the drunk kids go to pee, where they'll run if they think he's chasing them, the tricks they'll use to hide their open containers. He's like a biologist who's catalogued this species' full range of behavior. And it's an oddly biological job. His arrests revolve around alcohol going into the body, alcohol's effects on the body, and the resulting liquids coming out.

With Nick in the back of the car, we drive down the alley and pull into a parking lot on the other side. In the back corner is a large green generator.

Aaron Scott

We get out of the car and sure enough, as we approach, a splashing sound. And then Officer Hanes pulls a hunched student from behind the generator. He tells the public urinator to sit by the wall while he returns to the car to finish Nick's paperwork.

Since Nick is only one month shy of 21 and cooperative, Officer Hanes says he'll change the charge to disorderly conduct, which means Nick won't lose his license, but will still have to pay a fine.

Aaron Scott

As Nick leaves, he tries to shake hands.

Aaron Scott

Hanes tells me avoiding questionable handshakes is a regular hazard of the job. The public urinator also offered his.

Aaron Scott

There's a bottle of Purell in the driver's door compartment. But not everyone deals with is so civil. Maybe it's because they're drunk. But you know that deferential respect and anxiety most people feel when dealing with cops? That gets chucked out the window more than you think.

A few months back, Officer Hanes was pulling out of a parking deck to answer a call when three girls stopped him, waving their arms and screaming for help.

Aaron Scott

By 4 AM, the streets are empty. All in all, State College police issued 80 citations this weekend, including 17 for underage drinking. Not many, if you consider there were tens of thousands of underaged students drinking at Penn State. Officer Hanes told me he only goes after underage drinkers if they give them a reason, like fighting, carrying an open container, or being just sloppy drunk.

For a football weekend, it was pretty slow, which Officer Hanes chalks up to the team's relatively poor showing this fall. His job ebbs and flows with the success of the Nittany Lion, which puts him, as an alum and a fan, in an awkward position. He used to root for national championship. Now he prefers a one-loss team. He says it keeps the streets quieter.

Ira Glass

Aaron Scott.

Ira Glass

Act Four. A Drinking School With A Football Problem.

The big reason anybody worries about all the drinking at Penn State, of course, is it's dangerous. Every year, 1,700 college students across the country die of alcohol-related injuries. The average amount of alcohol in college students' blood when they come into the local emergency room in State College is steadily rising each year. It's now at 0.252, three times the legal limit at which you can drive a car. The head of the emergency department told me that it's a level that normal drinkers can't even usually get to because they'd throw up, fall asleep first.

What's interesting, if you ask Penn State administrators about what they're doing to deal with all the student drinking, they're not defensive. I met the head of University Relations with the school, the guy who's responsible for making the school look good to the public, and he was right upfront about it. Yeah, he said, drinking is a terrible problem, and we have tried everything we can think of to fix it, twice.

Which is actually more or less true. The school has spent millions attacking this problem. They've tried to teach the students, in all kinds of ways, about safer drinking. They created alcohol-free halls and dorms, they created a task force, there have been town-gown commissions, they've mounted a huge program of alcohol-free late night activities. The weekend we were there, that included comedian Patton Oswalt for free for students, free movies, a Halo tournament.

Obviously this hadn't gotten the job done. Sarah Koenig explains why this problem is just so hard for university administrators to fix.

Sarah Koenig

The first university president in the country to take on excessive drinking in a very public way was Graham Spanier when he arrived at Penn State 15 years ago. At a time when most schools didn't want to talk about it, he was relentless. Here he is in his 1998 State of the University speech.

Sarah Koenig

The message didn't always go down well. A month after this speech, Spanier was booed by students at a football game. A local bar ran an ad depicting him as Hitler, speaking with a German accent and sending storm troopers to raid a fraternity. He got pushback from alumni, a University trustee, even the local ACLU, who all said this wasn't an issue for a university president.

After 1998, he stopped hammering the topic so publicly, he says, in favor of working on it more behind the scenes. Ask the people behind the scenes today how it's going, and they'll tell you they're losing ground.

Linda Lasalle is the administrator in charge of educating Penn State students about the dangers of alcohol. Some of her work happens in the classroom.

Sarah Koenig

For ten years, Linda Lasalle's office has taught kids about blood alcohol levels and alcohol poisoning. They administer a mandatory online alcohol education program for incoming freshman called AlcoholEdu. They did a social norms media campaign aimed at changing students' behavior by teaching them that most students drink less than they think. Lasalle heard the plastic drinking cups they handed out became popular for beer pong.

Sarah Koenig

So armed with all these facts about what alcohol can do to you, students here seem to drink just as much as they always did.

Sarah Koenig

This worst case scenario, a student dying, was on everyone's mind this fall, because it happened in September, just a month after school started. Maintenance workers found the body of Joe Dado at the bottom of an outdoor stairwell. Dado had been missing for a couple of days after he left a frat party alone at 3:30 in the morning. It seems he'd been climbing on top of a wall between two classroom buildings and fallen on his head. He was a freshman, just 18 years old.

At other schools, the administration has sometimes used these sorts of deaths to push for change. In 2004, after a 19 year old sophomore at Colorado State named Samantha Spady was found dead of alcohol poisoning at the Sigma Pi frat house. The frat house was shut down, and all other fraternities banned alcohol. Alcohol sales were banned inside the football stadium, and her parents started a foundation in her name. MIT, Indiana University, University of Virginia all reacted with sweeping changes after alcohol deaths.

Here, the immediate reaction to Dado's death from senior administration was remarkable for its gentleness. Nobody hollered at the students to quit drinking so much. Rather, the message was, if you're going to get plastered, do it more responsibility. Graham Spanier issued a statement telling students to, quote, "Remember our commitment to one another's safety." Damon Simms, vice president of Student Affairs, told students at a meeting that he hoped the entire student body would double their efforts in watching out for each other.

Maybe they figured this message had a better chance of sticking, and it did stick. The lesson students have taken is not that Dado drank too much, but that he would be alive today if only he hadn't been alone.

My colleague Lisa Pollak talked to freshmen at the student union here.

Sarah Koenig

It seems to be the perennial lesson of these accidents. After a drunk girl fell from a sixth story window in 1997, this was the story in the local newspaper. Quote, "The death of a Penn State student at a party a week ago may prompt partygoers to keep a closer eye on each other's safety, students say. But, they add, the accident probably won't change their drinking behavior." Penn state students also fell to their deaths in 1993, 1987, 1984, 1983.

The averageness of what killed freshman Joe Dado is exactly why this is such a challenge for administrators. To Penn State students, the amount Dado drank that night is completely normal. After questioning his friends, police reported that Dado drank several shots of vodka and mixed drinks in his dorm, the whole pregaming thing, and then got on the shuttle bus with his friends. They went to a frat called ATO, played beer pong, drank four or five cans of Natural Light each. Then they went to Fiji, another frat, where Dado did a couple shots of whiskey. By the end of it, his blood alcohol level was high, but not crazy high. It was a third less than the average for kids brought to the emergency room for alcohol.

Sarah Koenig

The last person to talk to Dado that night was Jack Townsend, a 21 year old junior. He gave Dado those shots of whiskey at Fiji, and he's been criminally charged with providing alcohol to a minor, along with the frat.

Townsend was a friend of Dado's. He played soccer with him in high school. He took one of his sisters to the prom. He told producer Lisa Pollak that when he looks back at that night, it's hard for them to reconcile that something so ordinary led to something so terrible.

Sarah Koenig

Joe Dado's case fits neatly into a variety of depressing data sets. Researchers know, for instance, that the bingiest of the binge drinkers are white male freshmen, and even if he wasn't binging, there's the fact that most bad things happened early on in the school year. The alcohol ER admissions here for September are much higher than for the rest of the year, for instance. He drank Vladimir vodka that night, the most widely sold liquor in State College, and was hanging out with fraternity members, who tend to drink more than non-Greek students.

Bob Saltz, a senior research scientist at the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, says here's what's counterintuitive about managing drinking on college campuses and why so few are having success. He says that while your heaviest drinkers are of course at the highest risk of getting hurt or hurting somebody else, there aren't that many of them. So you really also need to be worrying about the light and moderate drinkers, who vastly outnumber the heavy drinkers. Kids like Joe Dado, who might only overdo it once in a while.

Sarah Koenig

Saltz's strategy for reducing risk to the biggest population of students is so simple that I missed it the first time he said it. You reduce risk by limiting kids' access to alcohol. The less alcohol is available, the less kids drink. The less they drink, the fewer bad things happen. In practice, what this means is a police crackdown, and just as importantly, the perception of one.

The problem with this strategy has been that there was hardly any campus-wide research to back it up, until now. Saltz is about to publish the results of an NIH-funded study he did at 14 California campuses. At half of them, cops went on party patrols, broke up large off-campus parties. They stepped up DUI enforcement and enforced laws against sales to minors at bars. And most important, they heavily publicized this stepped-up enforcement to students so they would start self-policing, rather than risk getting busted.

By the end of the study, Saltz found that fewer kids were getting drunk. The campuses where they cracked down reported 6,000 fewer drunk students coming from off-campus parties, and 4,000 fewer coming from bars.

Sarah Koenig

Saltz says sprawling university bureaucracies usually aren't well-suited to this kind of tough guy strategy. For one thing, they're run by educators, who tend to think they can simply teach kids to drink less. But when I asked him if there's any university out there that's having real, on-the-ground, sustained success, he immediately says yes. University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Their drinking reduction stats are the envy of the student affairs world.

Starting in 1998, the school teamed up with the city of Lincoln and declared an all-out war on out of control drinking-- a data-driven, goal-oriented war. Not only did they do the kind of police crackdown Saltz advocates, they attacked the problem from every possible angle, enlisting of bar owners, state legislators, liberal arts students, business students, high school principals. They lobbied to digitize Nebraska's driver's license to stop rampant fake IDs. They tried to knock down the average number of drinks on a student's 21st birthday from 14 to 7.

Linda Major, Assistant to the Vice Chancellor at UNL, was the general in this war from the beginning. She says breaking up wild parties in residential neighborhoods was one of the most controversial things they did early on. Also, one of the most effective.

Sarah Koenig

Major sensed the place felt different, and every statistical indicator backed up that feeling. There were far fewer neighbor complaints about parties. Students reported studying more, getting more sleep. Fewer people dropped out, and there were fewer reports of unwanted sex or driving drunk. Way more freshmen were abstaining from alcohol. And binge drinking numbers sank from 63% of students in 1997 down to 42% in 2007.

The frustration for Penn State is that it follows the same research as UNL, and does a lot of the same things. It has as many alcohol programs and interventions as any university in the country.

But one researcher told me that the problem is almost no colleges, Penn State included, properly evaluate what they're doing, so they really don't know what works and what doesn't. This work is tricky. There's so many variables that just because something works at one school doesn't mean it'll work the same way someplace else.

Still, it's clear Penn State has not done what UNL did-- joined with the town and declared total war. At least not recently. There's no shortage of complaints about the university's efforts. Why won't it ban alcohol from the dorms, or take on the widespread underage drinking, or punish students more harshly, expel them, even, when they break the law?

Sarah Koenig

Luckily, the one person at Penn State agitating for a complete overhaul of the University's drinking reduction strategy happens to be the guy in charge of them-- Damon Simms. He's the new vice president for Student Affairs, and he's not messing around. When he rattled off a list of recent meetings he's had on the topic, it was almost comical in its scope. The town manager, the editor of the local newspaper, the borough council, student government, town and university police, faculty, fraternity leaders, on and on.

Simms thinks being named number one party school and the death of Joe Dado have pushed the issue to some kind of tipping point, and he plans to capitalize on it. He's working on a list of ideas. When we met, it was 72 items long.

Sarah Koenig

He says that includes grade inflation, troublesome fraternities, and out-of-control tailgating. Simms will be proposing a bunch of new initiatives early next September, including new sanctions for students who break alcohol laws.

Already fraternities have new rules. No more Wednesday night parties. On other nights, photo ID required for entry, and professional bouncers at the door.

But what you hear all the time around here, off the record, from local residents, from faculty, from other administrators, is that Spanier really can't, or won't, do anything more draconian about the drinking problem here. Make fraternities dry, say, or curb tailgating. Because politically, he simply cannot risk alienating those secret cows Simms is talking about. Especially alumni and athletics, meaning football, which brings in enormous money.

Tens of thousands of alumni come to football games, rent skyboxes-- the only places in the stadium where you can drink, by the way. They arrange their lives around the season. It's a big part of why they give money to the school. Last year, alums and other donors gave $182 million.

I asked Spanier if there was something he needed to be careful about here in terms of the connection between football and donors and booze.

Sarah Koenig

When this comes up, it's sort of like, well, someone will say, why don't they just make tailgating dry, you know, no alcohol on university property? Is that kind of thing ever even brought up as like a, we just want to signal a culture change? We're just going to make a big bold move and say, we're going to become a different kind of school now? Is that ever on the table?

Sarah Koenig

One bright spot Spanier sees is that there's been a shift at Penn State since he started talking about this 15 years ago. Now for the first time academic deans and faculty leaders and student leaders are wanting to talk about this, saying they want to help.

Sarah Koenig

Do you feel optimistic?

Sarah Koenig

Joe Dado's death, he said, won't have any meaning to next year's freshmen. That's what makes universities like any other enterprise. Every year, the student body turns over by the thousands, so every year, he and his staff have to start all over again.

Ira Glass

Sarah Koenig.

Here's something else you need to know before we close this hour. People love Penn State. Students were spontaneously telling all of us how much they love the school, how they never want to college experience to end. They chant the school chant, "We are Penn State," not just in the football stadium-- in the student union, shuttle bus, out of the blue. They say "we are Penn State" in conversation, to make a point. They're part of this club that they're really excited to be part of. This feeling gets its purest expression at football games, where they're a hundred thousand strong, screaming together, but it permeates the school.

I went to the game when we were there with two juniors, Megan Koch and Zach Fliegel. Megan's Nittany Lions memories include the night of her high school homecoming, which was also the 2005 Michigan game. She was all dressed up. Her dad was on the cell phone.

Ira Glass

For Zach, it's also about the past and the future. On our way to the stadium, we passed some little boys in the tailgate.

Ira Glass

Lions played, Lions won. It was the last home game of the year, and seniors down in the first row were crying. Zach said even a bad game, being in the stadium, in the student section, was worth it.

And he pointed a third of the way up, 30 yard line. I went around to his friends in the student section. Nobody hesitated. 50 yard line, skybox, 30 yard line. Look for them. 2059. They all want to come back.

Ira Glass

Our program was produced today by Sarah Koenig and me with Alex Blumberg, Jane Feltes, Lisa Pollak, Robyn Semien, Aaron Scott, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Seth Lind is our production manager, Emily Condon our office manager. Our music consultant is Jessica Hopper.

[ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]

Our website, thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia, who never could have gotten into the frat party, except that girl insisted.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.