College students across the country, including those at NIU, are putting their beer cans down because of the pressure of harsher laws for underage drinking.

Amy Havasi, NIU health educator, said the number of people at NIU who drink to become intoxicated is decreasing.

In 1986, all the states were required to raise their drinking ages to 21. This caused many colleges to rethink their drinking policies.

Of the 932 colleges surveyed, 36 percent are now dry campuses, 54 percent prohibit alcohol at social events and 29 percent ban alcohol advertising on campus, the Feb. 1992 edition of U.: The National College Newspaper stated.

Colleges such as Princeton University, Purdue University, Dartmouth College and Skidmore College are a few examples of schools that have chosen to ban kegs instead of going dry.

Many college campuses across the country have formed alcohol awareness groups such as NIU’s Students Understanding Drinking Drugs and Self (SUDDS), or Boosting Alcohol Consciousness Concerning the Health of University Students (BACCHUS), which has more than 500 chapters across the country.

However, Ruth Engs, a professor at Indiana University in Bloomington, and David Hanson, a professor at the State University of New York in Postam, have been conducting a study for the past 10 years about the drinking habits of college students across the country.

The results showed the number of students who are having problems with the law, getting into fights, missing classes because of hangovers and receiving lower grades is increasing.

In an article in The Daily Eastern News, Lou Hencken, vice president of student affairs at Eastern Illinois University, stated the majority of the cases of students who have been asked not to return to the school the following semester is because they were involved with excessive amounts of alcohol.

“I’ve sat here reading appeals from students who have been academically dismissed and half the reasons are ‘I went to the bars too much,'” he stated.

The numbers indicate that college students drink 4 billion cans of beer, which, if stacked on top of each other, would exceed 70,000 miles past the moon.

“The only parties which people generally attend are the ones with alcohol present,” stated Michael Sheppard, president of Undergraduate Student Government at Case Western Reserve in University in U.: The National College Newspaper.