I was renewing my Professional Membership and came to the question on the form which asks how many schools I have visited since last year, and I decided to go into my excel sheet for the “Colleges Visited” List so that I was being accurate. When I came up with 38 schools, I sat back and thought to myself “Wow, did I really visit that many schools this year?’ I did because that is what good IEC’s do –it is the hallmark of what we offer our students and families, the guidance that is built on having spent time personally at the schools that we recommend to the students that we work with. I then thought back to the fly-in to Stetson in late February which was wonderful because the school has been rejuvenated by Rebecca Eckstein, formerly of Hollins College for 17 years, and Beth Paul, coming from the College of New Jersey where she also was for 17 years as she engineered the transformation from Trenton State! Now having seen Stetson first-hand, it is a school I am happy to put on my students’ lists, and I can talk intelligently to other IECs about the school as well. And yes, I was fortunate to be on the first LD South Carolina Schools Tour with a great group of colleagues to see Wofford, Furman, the University of South Carolina, Limestone College, the College of Charleston. Clemson, and the Citadel. – another terrific group of schools. And we met with the Learning Disability Providers on all those campuses – another layer of knowledge to share with our students. I can’t forget spending two days on the fantastic campus of Penn State University, home of the Nittany Lions, at the “Spend-A-Summer-Day” Counselor Tour, experiencing many of their different colleges….a special way to gather information to help students find the right program. These Counselor Tours actually parallel programs that potential students can attend in the summer so it is especially helpful. What a warm and wonderful place University Park is despite the fact that it is a little city! Something I never would have known had I not experienced it first-hand. The trip out to San Francisco with a colleague in late January was the best and we set up tours at 8 schools ranging from Stanford and Berkeley to Santa Clara, the San Francisco Art Institute and the University of San Francisco. It was fantastic…learning about schools from coast to coast!!!!!!! So you see, visiting campuses is something that IECs do a lot of, and love doing, and it is actually required of us, no matter how many years we have been “in the business.” It is also something that we know is essential to doing the best job we can for our students and families. I am looking forward to my upcoming “California Dreamin” Tour from July 24^th-29^th, organized by WACAC, the Western Association of College Admissions Counseling, as we will be touring 15 schools in the Los Angeles area. I will report on those schools when I return from that incredible tour at the end of the summer!

Bucknell University, my alma mater, and the alma mater of my son, Brian, has just announced a new initiative on campus drinking that is quite interesting and I wanted to share it with you. Here is the full story:

Bucknell joins collaborative to address high-risk drinking

Posted: June 22, 2011

By Julia Ferrante

LEWISBURG, Pa. – Bucknell University has joined Dartmouth College and 29 other colleges and universities across the country in an effort to address high-risk drinking on American campuses.

The Learning Collaborative on High-Risk Drinking, the first initiative of its kind, will allow the member institutions to identify and evaluate common issues related to excessive alcohol consumption and share ideas and propose solutions to problems on and around campuses.

“All campuses face a great challenge in the proclivity for high-risk drinking among college students today and the risks it poses to students’ academic goals and personal lives,” Bucknell President John Bravman said. “We’re proud to join this collaborative partnership of 30 prominent institutions from across the country to learn and share ideas that will help our students have the best possible college experience.”

Nearly 40 percent of college students in the United States engage in binge drinking, a number that has remained steady for decades, said Dartmouth College President Jim Yong Kim, a leader in the collaborative. Close to 2,000 college students in the United States die each year from alcohol-related injuries, including motor vehicle accidents; and an estimated 600,000 college students are injured while under the influence, according to research from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. In addition, research consistently has shown that binge drinking is linked to sexual abuse and unsafe sex as well as academic problems.

During the next 18 months, representatives from the member institutions, which include private, selective universities such as Cornell, Duke, Princeton and Stanford, as well as the state universities of New Hampshire, Vermont and Wyoming, will examine policies, programs and institutional goals and propose solutions.

“It is imperative that Bucknell be proactive about these issues,” said Susan Lantz, Bucknell’s dean of students and one of several University representatives participating in the collaborative. “We’re concerned about the negative consequences of drinking, such as missing classes, doing poorly on exams, health issues and making inappropriate decisions because judgment was impaired. What’s great about the collaborative is that we are learning from each other’s experiences in facing up to this reality.”

Teams of students, faculty and administrators from each school will meet face-to-face every six months during the initiative to share outcomes and assess which programs work, where they work and why. The group plans to publish its findings at the conclusion of the process. The Bucknell cohort includes Lantz, Assistant Professor of Psychology Chipper Dean, Staff Psychologist Hannah Roberts, Associate Athletics Director Maisha Palmer, and rising seniors Michael Higgins and Kate Domingues.

The Learning Collaborative methodology was developed by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement in Cambridge, Mass., and is aimed at spreading and adapting knowledge to different settings to address a given problem or health concern, according to Dartmouth officials. The model has been used successfully in medicine and public health. Using this system, participants are able to implement changes quickly and determine which methods are most effective in their institutions.

The Learning Collaborative on High-Risk Drinking is the inaugural effort of the National College Health Improvement Project (NCHIP), a joint undertaking between Dartmouth College and The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice (TDI). NCHIP aims to bring population health improvement methods to bear on problems affecting student health and plans to organize future collaboratives on other