war on fun > IvyGate

The War on Fun: Which Ivy Parties Hardest? And Which Ivy Gets Caught Partying Hardest?

by Jacob Savage | February 19, 2008 at 3:21 pm

The War on Fun: Which Ivy Parties Hardest? And Which Ivy Gets Caught Partying Hardest?

Joe's Dartblog has some very interesting statistics posted about alcohol and drug infractions across the Ivy League. We don't know where on Earth these stats came from, but we're going to give Joe the benefit of the doubt. And so we can finally answer the perennial question: do Dartmouth students really party harder? Or is the Dartmouth administration just better at prosecuting their draconian and never-ending War on Fun?

Between 2004 and 2006, Dartmouth students were about fifteen times more likely to get caught with alcohol than their peers at Penn. With an average of 52 infractions per thousand students, the average Dartmouth beer-guzzler has an over 5% chance of getting written up in a given year. Dartmouth students were also two and a half times more likely to get an alcohol infraction than those who attended the school with the second highest infraction rate - Cornell.

Brown students were cited at a rate of 14.7 per 1,000, Harvard at 12.3, Yale at 8.8, Princeton at 4.4, and Columbia at 3.7.

Joe astutely recognizes two possible scenarios that might explain the numbers: