STUDENTS MAKE COLLEGEVILLE, USA, SOUND LIKE SIN CITY

Listen up, parents.

College students don't think you want to know how much gambling
happens on campus. They really don't think you want to know about all
the drinking or drug use. And more than anything, they say you'd be
stunned to find out what goes on behind dorm room doors.

Forty-eight percent of college students on the state's three biggest
campuses say their parents would be shocked to learn how many sex
partners some of their classmates have, according to The Detroit Free
Press-Local 4 Michigan Poll of state college students.

Some suggested that their peers have as many as five sex partners a
month, while others said it's likely far fewer - two or three a year.
But national studies in recent years suggest that even those
estimates are too high.

"I think it really depends on who the person is," said Stephen
Morrison, a political science major at Michigan State University who
is graduating this weekend. "There are some people who really take it
more seriously than others."

Morrison, 22, of Fremont said on average, most students he knows
probably have two or three sex partners a year.

Kristen Nevi, a 20-year-old sophomore at MSU from Plymouth, estimated
that the number was much higher, saying sex on campus is an often
casual thing that comes after drinking or drug use.

"In a month, maybe I'd say average people hook up with about five
other people," she said.

Numbers may be exaggerated

Sex isn't the only vice students said they're parents would be
shocked to learn about. Of the 640 students surveyed at MSU, Wayne
State University and the University of Michigan, 44% said the amount
of illegal drug use would be shocking; 41% named alcohol use and 25%
listed gambling as a shocker. The poll was conducted April 9-16 over
by telephone by Selzer & Co. of Des Moines, Iowa, and has a margin of
error of plus or minus 3.9 percentage points.

But should news that college students are having sex, drinking and
doing drugs be all that shocking to parents? Some moms and dads of
the current crop of college kids were students themselves when a 1969
Gallup Poll was done surveying attitudes toward premarital sex and
illegal drug use.

At the time, 2 out of 3 college students said it wasn't wrong to have
sex before marriage, and 1-in-5 students said they had tried
marijuana, and many told pollsters they used the drug as readily as
they drank beer.

A 2005 study in the Journal of American College Health suggests that
boasting might lead students today to think their friends have more
sex partners than they really do.

The study found that 86% of college students said they had one or no
sex partners in the previous school year, but only 22% guessed that
the same was true for their classmates.

Binge drinking most troubling

Susan Foster, vice president and director of policy research at the
National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia
University, said the sense that alcohol and drug abuse - along with
the casual sex that typically follows those behaviors - are
considered part of the college experience.

"People look the other way, telling them it may be a right of
passage, when in fact nothing could be farther from the truth,"
Foster said.

Foster, whose center's most recent study, "Wasting the Best and
Brightest," surveyed 2,000 college students about drinking and
drug-use habits, and found that binge drinking is a growing problem.

"I think one of the things that was most shocking to us was despite
the fact that there's been a lot of attention to the problem of
substance abuse on college campuses.we've actually seen an
intensifying of this type of behavior among college students," Foster
said of the study, which was published in March.

"There are consequences we haven't thought about - increased chance
of risky sex, brain damage, accidents, increased link to mental
health problems, depression, anxiety, suicide and even homicide,"
Foster said. "These problems spill out from the college campuses to
the surrounding communities."

Gambling on campus

Jason Cupples, 20, of Berkley, a second-year student at Wayne State
majoring in computer science, said he wasn't surprised that 44% of
college students said their parents would be shocked to learn about
the illegal drug use on college campuses. Even though Wayne State is
a commuter school with a high percentage of older and returning
students, it's not humdrum.

"There's plenty of partying going on," he said. "It's the college
life to do all of that stuff."

Nathan Cramton, 20, a junior studying screen arts and culture at U-M,
said parents wouldn't find it shocking that college students drink or
have sex or do drugs. Rather, he said, they'd probably be surprised
by how much gambling happens on the Ann Arbor campus.

"It's kind of accepted as normal. It's always kind of laughed off as
not really a problem," he said, adding that card games and sports
gambling consume a lot of students' time.

"Especially at a school like U-M, which while it has strong
academics, it also has very strong athletics," he said.