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By  Kate Hidalgo Bellows April 11, 2023

It was almost midnight on St. Patrick’s Day at the University of Michigan, and the party was in full swing. Inside, college students were stumbling and falling to the ground as the Killers’ “Mr. Brightside” pulsated through the room. A line ran out the door, filled with eager faces looking for a good time.

No, this wasn’t a fraternity mixer. This was Sober Skate.

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It was almost midnight on St. Patrick’s Day at the University of Michigan, and the party was in full swing. Inside, college students were stumbling and falling to the ground as the Killers’ “Mr. Brightside” pulsated through the room. A line ran out the door, filled with eager faces looking for a good time.

No, this wasn’t a fraternity mixer. This was Sober Skate.

And people weren’t falling onto a sticky wood floor, but a skating rink at the Yost Ice Arena. The event was so popular that within the first 30 minutes, the rental desk had already leased 300 of its 350 pairs of skates. The 45 large pizzas that organizers ordered were gone in an hour, as were the cases of Faygo and Diet Coke.

Each year around St. Patrick’s Day, Sober Skate — co-hosted by Michigan’s Collegiate Recovery Program and the Washtenaw Recovery Advocacy Project — offers local college students and community members a dry alternative to the holiday’s liquor-soaked festivities. Not all attendees identify as sober, but they’ve all chosen to abstain from alcohol on one of the highest-risk drinking nights of the year.

“Hundreds of people come out,” said Matthew Statman, manager of the recovery program, which supports students healing from substance-use issues. “And most of them are just young people who are not interested in drinking green beer.”

This year’s Sober Skate was the most popular yet. Statman said he is always surprised by how many students “come out of the woodwork” to attend the program’s substance-free events.

Emily Elconin for The ChronicleA sober skating event hosted by the Collegiate Recovery Program at Yost Ice Arena in Ann Arbor, Mich.

“They’re everywhere,” Statman said. “Most students are not using substances heavily or frequently, but they’re just in the libraries and in the dorms. And you wouldn’t see them otherwise.”

For as long as the modern campus has existed — as long as films like Animal House and She’s the Man have primed expectations for campus life — administrators have tried to curb dangerous drinking. While students’ participation in drinking has fallen in the past 40 years, high-risk binge drinking has remained a stubborn problem.

Yet recently, there’s been a shift in many students’ attitudes toward drinking. Instead of seeing alcohol as a fact of college life, more students are questioning its presence in their lives. Many are deciding they don’t want it to be in their lives — or at least not as much.

Drinking remains widespread on campuses, and other substances are only becoming more popular. Still, students who choose sobriety are facing less social shame and judgment than in years past.

That’s great news for administrators who have long worked toward this end. But now they must figure out how to help students lead fulfilling social lives without alcohol — a substance which, like it or not, is entangled with many colleges’ bottom lines.

The sober movement’s roots formed long ago. It might not feel like it, but student drinking has been on a downward turn for the last four decades.

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In 1981, 82 percent of students reported drinking in the previous 30 days. In 2021, that figure was less than 60 percent. The data come from the National Institute on Drug Abuse’s Monitoring the Future survey, which experts say is a reliable measure of students’ alcohol consumption. Students’ participation in drinking trended downward until about 1997 and has continued to decline slightly since then.

About 44 percent of students in 1981 self-reported binge drinking in the previous two weeks, according to the survey. In 2020, when many college students were home because of the pandemic, the binge-drinking rate fell to 24 percent, but it bounced back to 30 percent in 2021. Binge drinking is defined as having five or more drinks in one sitting.

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