Joseph Milnamow
Research Mentor: John Kubale
Mentor Department: ICPSR, ISR
Author(s): Joseph Milnamow, Isabella Kan, John Kubale
Session: Session 4 (1:00 PM – 1:50 PM)
Presentation Type: Poster 87
Abstract
Drinking at colleges is widespread and can be associated with many harmful effects. College drinking culture has become the norm with some students recognizing it as “an integral part of their higher education experience†(NIH, 2025). Although college drinking culture has been studied extensively, there is still a lot to glean from data on this topic. I sought to investigate how the enforcement of underage drinking laws on college campuses may have changed during the COVID pandemic. This project used data sourced from the Inter-university Consortium of Political and Social Research’s (ICPSR) data repository, Datalumos. Datalumos contains publicly-available government data that were uploaded by users to ensure their continued availability. This project used the “Campus Safety and Security†dataset which contains data from 2008-2023 on university crime statistics as required by the Clery Act. Each school in the United States reported both on-campus and off-campus liquor law arrests and discipline referrals per year, as well as the student population and type of college (4-year vs. 2-year, public vs. private). I chose to focus on only Michigan college on-campus liquor-related disciplinary referrals, comparing 4-year vs. 2-year colleges, and colleges of different population sizes. By creating visualizations of average liquor-related referrals by year and comparing the distribution of on-campus liquor-related disciplinary referrals from before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, this project studies how the rate of liquor law violations changed between the two periods of 2016-2019, pre-COVID pandemic, and 2020-2022, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Although not yet complete, the results of this project aims to shed light on the possible effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on rates of liquor-related crime on college campuses in Michigan. “Harmful and Underage College Drinking.†National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Jan. 2025, www.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/brochures-and-fact-sheets/college-drinking. “The Jeanne Clery Act.†Clery Center, www.clerycenter.org/the-clery-act. Accessed 14 Mar. 2026.
