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Jacob Blumenfeld, a member of the New School In Exile activist group, was arrested outside the home of New School president Bob Kerrey at 3:55 am on Thursday morning. Blumenfeld had allegedly been spraypainting the words “Bye Bob” on Kerrey’s front door.
Sarah Paley, Kerrey’s wife, said that Blumenfeld and two other individuals had attracted police attention because they wearing ski masks in mild weather. Blumenfeld, the only one of the three who was apprehended, is reportedly facing five criminal counts.
The New School In Exile announced in February that they would “shut down” the university on April 1 if Kerrey and New School vice president Jim Murtha did not resign by that date. Their deadline is now sixteen days away.
A Friday morning post on the NSIE blog made the following declaration: “We stand together, We have Solidarity, We do what we do because of love for each other and love for our future.”
Wednesday’s edition of USA Today reported the results of a study released by NASPA, a national association of student personnel administrators, that claimed to show that — in the paper’s words — “College Freshmen Study Booze More Than Books.”
It’s a story with understandable appeal, one that has garnered attention on radio, television, and many, many, many, many, many, many, many blogs.
Despite its academic bona fides, however, the study was conducted by Outside the Classroom (OTC), a for-profit company that offers online alcohol education programs to colleges, and its methods and conclusions don’t stand up to close scrutiny. This isn’t serious academic work, it’s a thinly-disguised ad for Outside the Classroom’s products.
Yesterday we looked at OTC and NASPA to answer the question of who produced the report and why, and today we’re going to take a close look at some of the flaws in the study itself.
Fourteen of them, to be exact.
1. The study isn’t scholarly research.
The documentation Outside the Classroom has released on this study consists of a two-page press release, a one-page writeup of methodology and findings, and an anemic page and a half of notes and references. It makes no attempt to establish statistical significance for its findings, and provides no defense of its methodology, no serious literature review, no text of the questions asked. This is a marketing device, not an academic document.
2. Its title misrepresents its conclusions.
The title of the report is “College Students Spend More Time Drinking Than Studying,” but the researchers found that only 34% of students surveyed did so, and concluded that in an average week the average student spends more time studying than drinking.
The group of students who, the researchers found, spent more total time drinking than studying consisted of those first-years who reported having had at least one drink in the past two weeks. And even among those students, it found that a majority spent more time studying than drinking.
3. A questionable definition of “students who used alcohol.”
The OTC survey asked students whether they had consumed any alcohol in the last year, and then asked those students to specify how many drinks they had consumed each day in the last two weeks. Students who said they hadn’t drunk in the previous year were thus excluded from the study at the outset.
When compiling their statistics, however, OTC defined “drinkers” as only those students who had consumed alcohol in the previous two weeks. Occasional drinkers — students who had consumed alcohol in the past year, but not in the past two weeks — were dropped from the study as non-drinkers, and thus excluded from averages of how much time students spend drinking.
4. Overheated descriptions of time spent “drinking.”
The report refers to time spent drinking as time spent “downing alcohol,” “consuming alcohol,” and so on. If a student spends an hour and a half having dinner with friends and has two glasses of wine along the way, can we really characterize that as 90 minutes spent “downing alcohol”?
5. Inexplicably small sample size.
Outside the Classroom used students who took an online survey through its AlcoholEdu program as their research subjects. OTC’s website claims that more than half a million students on more than five hundred American campuses use AlcoholEdu every year, but the study incorporates a sample of just 30,183 students.
That’s just six percent of the total, and less than a quarter of the first-years one would expect to find in the pool. What happened to the rest of the data?
6. Questionable sample selection.
The title of the report describes it as a study of “college students,” and a quote from OTC’s founder, Brandon Busteed, claims it demonstrates that many students are “drinking their way through college.” So why is the sample limited to students in the first semester of freshman year?
Are the drinking habits of first-semester students representative of those of the student body as a whole? If not, why portray them that way? What motivated the decision to exclude all students other than first-semester first-years from the study?
7. Questionable methodology for computing time spent drinking.
Rather than asking students how much time they had spent drinking over the past two weeks, OTC chose to ask each of them about the length of just one of their drinking sessions, and calculate totals on that basis. This is a defensible approach, as students may be more able to accurately estimate the length of a single event than a cumulative figure. But the way OTC performed their calculations is really really weird.
Here’s how they did it:
They asked each student how many drinks he or she had consumed in each of the previous fourteen days. Then they selected the day on which the student had consumed the most drinks, and asked how long that drinking session had lasted. Then they averaged all those results from all students for each number of drinks, compiling an average length of a one-drink drinking session, a two-drink session, and so on. Then they applied those numbers to each student’s report of each of his or her drinking sessions.
If a student reported having one drink on one day, two drinks on another, and five drinks on a third, in other words, OTC estimated the length of the one-drink session on the basis of an average of the lengths of all the sessions in which students reported that one drink was the most they had consumed in a single day.
There is no explanation in the report as to why they collected the data in such an odd way.
8. Questionable methodology for computing time spent studying.
In 2007, OTC asked its survey respondents how much time they spent studying in the previous two weeks. But instead of asking that question again in 2008, or using the 2007 survey data for their study, or combining 2007 studying data with 2008 drinking data, they did something truly bizarre. They amalgamated survey results from an independent study, The American Freshman: National Norms for 2007, with their own 2007 data and numbers from an unpublished 2008 dissertation “using a mean estimation procedure” that they do not describe in their report.
They provide no rationale for this decision, which has the effect of rendering their data and methods completely opaque.
9. Questionable methodology for computing time spent on other pursuits.
The study’s estimates of time students spent working for pay and doing “online networking or playing video games” are likewise aggregated from multiple sources with no explicit methodology. Estimates of time spent “social networking” are taken from the unpublished dissertation mentioned above, and estimates of time spent exercising are taken from a journal article that studied the exercise habits of international students at five midwestern universities.
10. An unsubstantiated claim of primacy of drinking over other activities.
The report declares flatly that “no other activity occupies nearly as much” of a first-year student’s time “as drinking.” But as noted above, the study did not attempt to measure such activities as classroom attendance, socializing, commuting, television watching, or participation in clubs and organizations.
11. An eyebrow-raising estimate of time spent online.
The report claims, on the basis of an unpublished 2008 dissertation, that the average American first-year spent just 2.5 hours a week on online social networking. Given that a major study conducted way back in 2002 — before MySpace, FaceBook, Twitter, or the blog explosion — found that three-quarters of college students spent four or more hours online each week, we’re a little skeptical of that claim.
12. Unwarranted conclusions as to the difficulty of the college curriculum.
CTO founder Busteed is quoted as saying that the report “calls into question whether faculty are demanding enough hard work from their students.” As noted in point 7 above, however, the study presents no original research regarding the amount of time students spend studying.
13. Unwarranted extrapolation of “snapshot” drinking data to the entire first year.
The two-week snapshot of students’ drinking habits was obtained in a survey conducted during the fall semester. The report does not specify when during the semester the survey was conducted, or whether its timing was at the discretion of students or administrators. Either way, it seems highly likely that the survey would have taken place during a slow period during the semester, when students would be most likely to have time to devote to the project.
Does it really make sense to estimate an entire year’s drinking behavior on the basis of figures gathered in the academic doldrums of September or October? Does OTC have reason to believe that students drink as much during the end-of-semester push as they do in weeks when they have time to fritter away on alcohol surveys?
14. Apples-to-oranges comparison of time spent drinking to other activities.
In estimating time spent drinking, as noted above, the study considers only those students who had consumed a drink in the previous two weeks. But in calculating time spent at work, exercising, and online, the study uses an average of all students, whether they engaged in those activities or not. This produces such results as the claim that the average student spent just 2.2 hours a week in paid work.
As we noted earlier, yesterday’s edition of USA Today reported the results of a study that claimed to show that — the paper’s words — “College Freshmen Study Booze More Than Books.” In this post we take a look at where that study came from.
USA Today described the study as having been conducted by “William DeJong, a professor at Boston University School of Public Health,” and as having been “sponsored” by Outside the Classroom, “a Boston-based company that offers alcohol-prevention programs to colleges.” It said the study had been presented at the annual meeting of NASPA, a student personnel administrators’ association, and quoted NASPA’s executive director, Gwendolyn Jordan Dungy, as expressing “surprise” at the study’s results.
The paper was being less than forthcoming with its readers, however, as the corporate press release from which it took Dungy’s quote demonstrates.
William DeJong is a professor at Boston University, as USA Today reported, but he’s also Director of Program Research and Development for Outside the Classroom (OTC), and it was in that capacity — as an employee of a privately held, for-profit company, that he conducted his “study.”
So where does NASPA come in? Well, OTC has been a sponsor of NASPA since 2001, and NASPA has been touting OTC’s products in press releases since at least 2003. The company is listed as one of NASPA’s six Strategic Partners on the NASPA website — depending on the partnership level OTC has purchased, that status may represent an annual contribution of as much as $100,000 or more.
OTC is paying NASPA to promote its products … and it paid for the chance to present the findings of its study at their conference as well.
The NASPA website lists OTC as one of eight Gold Level Sponsors of its 2009 national conference, with Gold Sponsorship defined as reflecting a donation of $15,000 or more. A partnership benefits chart lists the privileges associated with Gold Sponsorship as including a “brief speaking opportunity at national conference” and an “opportunity to co-present a workshop.”
As it turns out, OTC received far more than just a “brief speaking opportunity” at this year’s conference. It was granted two separate 75-minute workshops: one promoting its Alcohol Prevention Coalition (APC) and another promoting its AlcoholEdu web service. It was given space and time for a four-hour “Meeting of Founding Partners” of the APC, and an OTC employee was one of three panelists on a workshop entitled “Alcohol Prevention Excellence: Successful Strategies from Award-Winning Campuses.” In all, OTC representatives participated in four of NASPA’s ten sessions on campus alcohol issues, and ran at least three of those four. NASPA identified two of OTC’s four sessions as corporate events — as infomercials, in essence.
OTC has an obvious interest in promoting the idea that American college students are drinking to excess — the more the public can be convinced that student drinking is a crisis, the more demand there will be for OTC’s products. And given OTC’s support for NASPA, OTC’s interests in this arena are NASPA’s interests as well.
In the full version of the press release quote that USA Today excerpted, NASPA’s Dungy was quite forthright in linking the study’s findings to a pitch for OTC:
“As student affairs professionals, we view the issue of college drinking as one of the biggest threats to our effectiveness as educators. Our hope is that this new finding will motivate all those within the academy, and even the larger community, to join us as we redouble our efforts to de-emphasize the role of alcohol in college life. Indeed, while comprehensive prevention programming has always been an imperative, it is clearly now more important than ever.“
(Emphasis added.)
There’s nothing illegitimate in Dungy providing this sort of support for a funder, by the way. NASPA is forthright about its relationship with Outside the Classroom, and OTC’s press release — distributed on NASPA letterhead — makes no secret of the ties between the two groups. If journalists (and bloggers) fail to make those connections clear, that’s mostly their failure, not NASPA’s or OTC’s.
As we noted this morning, however, USA Today’s headline (“College Freshmen Study Booze More Than Books”) seriously misrepresented the findings of OTC’s research, and OTC and NASPA do have to take some responsibility for that — their press release was entitled “College Students Spend More Time Drinking Than Studying.” And if OTC’s study was itself flawed, as the evidence suggests it was, NASPA has to take some responsibility for that as well.
More on those two issues in our next post.
The flawed study of college students’ drinking habits that got such an ugly writeup in yesterday’s USA Today was produced in conjunction with NASPA, a professional association of campus student affairs administrators.
The USA Today article described Outside the Classroom, “a Boston-based company that offers alcohol-prevention programs to colleges,” as the study’s sponsor. It said the study’s lead researcher had been “William DeJong, a professor at Boston University School of Public Health.” The study’s findings, it reported, had been presented that day at NASPA’s annual meeting.
The article prominently quoted Gwendolyn Jordan Dungy, NASPA’s executive director, as hoping that the study would prompt others to work with her group “as we redouble our efforts to de-emphasize the role of alcohol in college life.”
Here’s what the article didn’t say: Outside the Classroom is a major donor to NASPA. NASPA grants its donors time to make infomercial-style presentations at its conferences. DeJong is an employee of Outside the Classroom, and his “study” is a glorified press release for the company’s products.
USA Today and NASPA are promoting a for-profit educational services company, and they’re arguably doing it by mischaracterizing student culture. In two upcoming posts we’ll explore the relationship between NASPA and Outside the Classroom, and the ways that their partnership may be compromising the interests of America’s students.
Update: Follow-up posts:
April 10 update: If you’re looking for news on this morning’s New School building occupation, you can find it here.
Dozens of New York City police swarmed into Washington Square Park late last night in response to rumors of a planned midnight protest at NYU’s Bobst library.
An NYU spokesperson said the university had received word that student activists at the New School had been discussing an upcoming Bobst action, and requested the police presence — fifty cops, thirty police cars, and at least one paddy wagon — as a “precaution.”
The cops set up barricades on Washington Square South, but stood down by 2 am when it became clear that no protest was taking place.
NYU student activists Take Back NYU! mounted a 40-hour occupation of the university’s Kimmel Center last month, and New School students sat in at a campus dining hall for 30 hours in December. The New School activists, who call themselves The New School In Exile, have pledged to shut down that campus on April 1 if the university’s widely-reviled president and vice president do not resign before then.
April first is twenty-one days from today. This is shaping up to be a jittery three weeks for NYU and New School administrators.
Evening update: There was an anonymous flyer drop into the atrium of the Bobst library this afternoon. Text: “The time has come to begin our refusal. We cannot allow ourselves to stand idly by while NYU profits by our intelligence, lining other people’s pockets while our future slips away. The crises we face are too great for self-interest-as-usual. This is the beginning of their end, and our beginning. Out of their fall, we will rise. Will you rise with us?”
Morning update: NYU Local has a video from the flyer-droppers.
studentactivism.net 
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