As the first half of the school year winds down, we can only hope that the impact alcohol will have on America's college campuses in the second half of the year is not nearly as deadly as it was during the fall semester.

At Colorado State University, 19-year-old Samantha Spady died after downing between 30 and 40 drinks. At nearby University of Colorado, 18-year-old freshman Lynn Gordon Bailey died in what was reported to be a hazing incident involving alcohol. And at the University of Oklahoma, 19-year-old Blake Hammontree was found dead with a blood-alcohol level more than five times the state's legal driving limit.

If statistics from past years are any guide, approximately 1,400 college students will die during the 2004-2005 school year in alcohol-related incidents. If binge drinking was a disease that caused 1,400 deaths, 500,000 injuries, 70,000 sexual assaults, and 110,000 arrests each year, you could be certain that the response would be massive and comprehensive. How many more students must die before we decide to stop treating binge drinking as a collegiate rite of passage, and confront it as the serious public-health threat that it is?

While alcohol itself is a legal product that can be used responsibly by adults, many colleges foster a peculiar "alcohol culture." This environment both encourages and enables irresponsible and often underage drinking.

How many adults typically walk out of their homes or offices to be greeted by giant posters of buxom beer-drinking twins, or leaflets advertising dime drafts, 25-cent highballs, and sweet but potent shots with enticing names like "Sex on the Beach," the "Bionic Beaver," and the "Mind Eraser"? Yet this was exactly the scene encountered by Denver Post reporters when they chronicled the environment that still prevails in the commercial areas surrounding the University of Colorado and Colorado State in the wake of recent student deaths. As the article aptly stated, "a smorgasbord of cheap and seductive incentives to get plastered greet Colorado college students, and many dig in with glee."

The Harvard School of Public Health estimates that 44 percent of college students regularly binge drink. Imagine if four out of 10 adults engaged in behavior like going out four or five nights during the work week to gulp down six or seven beers, knock back several shots of liquor, and then head home for a nightcap? Yet such a daily scenario is played out weekly across the country involving thousands of college students, many under the legal age to purchase alcohol.

So how do we begin to address this epidemic of underage binge drinking? A good place to start is by encouraging university administrators to implement comprehensive campus-wide programs like A Matter of Degree (AMOD), a national effort to reduce high-risk drinking among college students administered by the American Medical Association. AMOD calls for universities and the communities of which they are a part to support environmental changes that deemphasize alcohol as a part of college life, such as enforcement of minimum drinking-age laws and limiting access to low-cost, high-volume drink specials.

Harvard researchers have indicated that when substantial environmental changes are adopted, reductions in binge drinking and decreases in harmful "second-hand effects" of bingeing, such as date rape, assault, and vandalism, can be expected. That's good news for those concerned about college students' health and safety, because the numbers are significant. In 2003, for example, an Air Force Academy Working Group reviewed sexual assault at the school and found that alcohol use had been involved in 40 percent of the investigated cadet-on-cadet incidents.

Administrators and policy makers should also review evidence-based studies that document how high-volume, low-price alcohol promotions in the college environment can fuel binge drinking. The results suggest that policies aimed at curtailing such activities could help reduce gross over-consumption of alcohol and its damaging effects.

What is needed most, however, is a greater sense of urgency in insisting that the status quo of 1,400 young deaths each year is unacceptable. that half-hearted efforts will bring little change, and that this is not simply a matter of a "rite of passage" or personal responsibility. Indeed, the National Academy of Sciences, among America's most respected research organizations, in a 2003 report called underage drinking a "collective responsibility."

For college administrators, students, parents, alumni, politicians, and society in general, the time has come to choose: Do we want to cultivate institutions of higher learning or of lower expectations and harder drinking? Opportunities abound to make a difference. What's missing is a concerted will to act. The death toll will be a testament to our timidity.

Dwayne Proctor, Ph.D., M.A., is a senior communications officer at The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which supports the "A Matter of Degree" program. Proctor was formerly on the faculty of the University of Connecticut School of Medicine.