According to a recent report from the National Task Force on College Drinking (CQ Historic Documents, 2002) 1,400 college students die each year in alcohol-related accidents, while another 500,000 are injured, and more than 70,000 are the victims of alcohol-related sexual abuse or date rape. Prevention efforts must be aimed at reducing college alcohol related harm due to alcohol consumption. These prevention efforts will be generated by current research.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the factors related to alcohol consumption in college students The factors, which have been shown in the literature to significantly correlate to student's alcohol consumption, are parental alcohol use, lack of religiosity, athletic involvement, goal constructs, alcohol outcome expectancies, and Greek membership in fraternities and sororities.

Multiple regression and path analysis did not support the hypothesized nature of the relationships among the variables. The direct paths that were statistically significant included lack of religiosity's positive correlation to alcohol consumption, lack of goals positive correlation to alcohol consumption, and to negative expectancies, positive expectancy's positive correlations to Greek affiliation and alcohol consumption and Greek affiliations' positive correlation to alcohol consumption.