| . | . | |
Morality and Decency Conference Speakers
|
||
Newsletter Updates
August 25, 2008
|
 |
|||
student life, for students who are interested in seeking them out. More importantly, as my experience at Princeton has shown, students who want to band together to support each other, or even to change the campus culture, can do so with amazing success. So here is my advice to anyone looking to stay strong in college. Read On |
||||
Regular church attendance may boost a student's GPA, according to a new study. Students who attend religious services weekly average a GPA of 0.144 higher than those who never attend services, said Jennifer Glanville, a sociologist in the University of Iowa College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Despite the positive link between church attendance and academic success, the study surprisingly found the importance of religion to teens had "very little impact" on their educational outcomes, Glanville noted, according to the University of Iowa News Services. The study had looked at whether the teens said religion was important to them. "That suggests that the act of attending church – the structure and the social aspects associated with it – could be more important to educational outcomes than the actual religion," the sociologist suggested. Glanville, who led the study, and David Sikkink and Edwin Hernandez of the University of Notre Dame analyzed data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, a nationally representative study that explores the causes of health-related behaviors of adolescents in grades 7 through 12 and their outcomes in young adulthood. Church-Going Teens Have Higher GPAs |
 |
|||
| Rape is more common on college campuses with higher rates of binge drinking – and
 alcohol use is a central factor in most college rapes, finds a new study released by the Harvard College Alcohol Study.
Overall, one in 20 (4.7 percent) women reported being raped in college since the beginning of the school year – a period of approximately 7 months – and nearly three-quarters of those rapes (72 percent) happened when the victims were so intoxicated they were unable to consent or refuse. These were among the findings of a study of 119 schools nationwide, by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health College Alcohol Study, Saint Joseph's University and the University of Arizona, published in the January 2004 issue of the Journal of Studies on Alcohol.
Most significantly, women from colleges with medium and high binge-drinking rates had more than a 1.5-fold increased chance of being raped while intoxicated than those from schools with low binge- drinking rates. Other significant risk factors for rape were being under 21 years old, white, residing in sorority houses, using illicit drugs and binge drinking in high school. "This study reveals that a woman's chance of being raped is far more pronounced on campuses where the student body as a whole engages in a high rate of binge drinking and when individuals consume a large amount of alcohol," said Meichun Mohler-Kuo, Sc.D., lead author of the study and research scientist at the College Alcohol Studies at Harvard School of Public Health.
Heavy episodic drinking (or binge drinking) is the number one public health problem among college students – associated with a range of consequences that include lower grades, vandalism and physical and sexual violence. Indeed, frequent and even occasional binge drinkers were more likely to have been raped while intoxicated, the study found.
Rape Linked to Heavy College Drinking |
||||
|
||||
Family Concerns
|
||||
Opinions expressed in 'Perspectives' columns published by CentersForDecency.org are the sole responsibility of the article's author(s), or of the person(s) or organization(s) quoted therein, and do not necessarily represent those of the staff or management of, or advertisers who support the CfD. If you wish to contact CfD - call 713-266-2715 or write: 1415 South Voss Road, #110-393, Houston, Texas 77057. We also appreciate your Comments@CentersForDecency. |
||||
If you come to college from any kind of traditional background, especially a religious one, your beliefs and values are going to be challenged.Sometimes they will be challenged directly, in the classroom and in casual conversations, as professors and schoolmates wonder aloud about many of the things, from family to faith, that you have taken for granted as true and good. More often, however, the challenges will be subtle and indirect, stemming from a campus culture that rests on an entirely different foundation. For a typical college student, a good day consists of sleeping late, watching TV, and drinking beer (not necessarily in that order). Don’t get me wrong: all of those things have their appeal—and justifiably so. But they are not the key ingredients to an experience that once was about turning boys and girls into young men and women. Decades ago, colleges were more committed to the character formation of their students, and they sought to teach lessons of virtue through the great works of Western civilization. But with the decline of support for moral education, colleges became agnostic on important questions of right and wrong. This is why, as I often argue, colleges do not warn their students against engaging in promiscuous sex; they only warn them to be “safe” when doing so. This is not to say that things are all bad. Many colleges do offer the resources, in academics and in