Do students mandated to intervention for campus alcohol-related violations drink more than nonmandated students?

It is often assumed that "mandated students" (i.e., those who violate campus alcohol policies and are mandated to receive an alcohol intervention) drink more than students from the general population. To test this assumption empirically, we compared alcohol-use levels of a sample of students mandated for alcohol violations (n = 435) with a representative sample of nonmandated students from the same university (n = 1,876). As expected, mandated students were more likely to be male, younger, first-year students, and living in on-campus dorms, and they reported poorer academic performance (i.e., grade point averages). With respect to alcohol use, after controlling for demographic differences, they reported more drinks per week than those in the general university sample but they did not report drinking heavily more frequently than nonmandated students. Within the mandated student sample, there was considerable variability in drinking level; that is, the frequency of heavy drinking covered the full range from never to 10+ times in the past month, and there was a larger standard deviation for drinks per week among mandated students than among those in the general sample. These results challenge the assumption that mandated students drink heavily more often but do provide empirical support for the assumption that students who violate alcohol policies drink at higher quantities, justifying the need for an alcohol use reduction intervention.