IU tapped as top 'draft' pick

On the Saturday night before classes start, the house party circuit is in full swing. \nWalking down Ninth Street, a group of girls giggle into the night as they link arms to travel from one house party toward another. At this particular party, there's a keg in the basement and a beer pong table in the living room.\nHolding a white plastic cup of beer, junior Dicky Hall stands in the kitchen with his friend, Georgetown University junior Inaki Cue chatting with a groups of girls dressed in sequins and \ngaucho pants.\n"Beer," Hall said smiling, "is an acquired taste."\n"Yes," Cue chimes in. "It's delicious."\nFrom freshman to fifth years, beer is the drink of choice for many at IU. Many bars' drink specials revolve around cheap beer, such as $0.15 beers Wednesdays at the Bluebird and $0.15 beers at Kilroy's on Kirkwood for Bladder Bust Friday nights. The drink is so popular, in fact, that The Princeton Review ranked IU as the No. 1 school for beer (and No. 6 for partying) based on surveys submitted to students across the country for its annual publication "The 361 Best Colleges." \n"I think it's funny how people make such a big deal about when IU earns a number one party school ranking or this latest 'Beer' ranking," said IU-Bloomington Interim Chancellor Ken Gros Louis. "You need to take it with a grain of salt because the methodology is so poor."\nRobert Franek, the book's author for the past seven years, disagrees.\n"It's a qualitative survey," he said. "It's the longest ongoing student survey in the country. One hundred thousand students can't be wrong. I'm not going to discredit their voices."\nFranek said the book's objective is to inform college-bound students and their parents about what they can expect at certain schools, for example if there is an active social scene or not.\nSunday afternoon, a few empty beer cans litter the yard of a five-bedroom house on 10th Street. A 24-count box of Bud Light bottles, now empty, sits next to the door. Inside, the house's five occupants spread out on couches and chairs in the unairconditioned living room, playing "Halo 2" and drinking Keystone.\n"It's a good replacement for air conditioning," said senior Kevin Lloyd. "It cools us on the inside."\nThe student survey is available year-round on The Princeton Review's Web site, but Franek said they officially begin distributing the survey to schools in October after getting permission to market the survey from an administrator at each school.\nDee Owens, the director of The Alcohol/Drug Information Center, said it's normal to have a drink or two when you're 21 to make you feel more relaxed, but there are problems when drinkers exceed the limit.\n"Three drinks is the maximum (number of) drinks that should be had in a sitting to make good judgements," she said. "Two drinks or more an hour is a binge drinking rate."\nFranek said he felt uncomfortable disclosing the name of his IU contact, but said it was an administrator in either the admissions or communications department. About 300 students from IU completed the survey.\n"(The number one ranking) doesn't surprise me," said senior Curt Streicher who said he drinks 18 beers on a good night. "IU is a large school in the Midwest and I can see beer being a more popular drink in the Midwest."\nJoel Sterrett, the beer manager at the Big Red Liquors on College Avenue, said between 150 and 175 kegs were bought last week. The store ordered 400 kegs for the first two weeks of school last year.\n"We're the number one school for beer?" he said. "That's awesome. This is definitely a beer community."\nSterrett said the most popular selling beer is Keystone Light, the beer the guys on 10th Street serve for their parties.\n"If we don't want to charge people, we serve cheap beer," said senior Robbie Comer.\nComer calls beer the social drink, and while most drinking games involve cards, such as Kings, Horse Race or Screw the Dealer, Streicher decided to take beer games to the next level. This past summer Streicher made large Drinko board, modeled off the game Plinko on the TV show "The Price is Right." A three-foot staircase is attached to the back so players can drop an object through the board's 90 pegs to see how many drinks they will give out or take.\nStreicher said their house is already known for the game and that people stop by to have their picture taken with the board.\n"It's better than a puppy," he said.\nOwens said she hears students say they're young and don't need to worry about their livers so they'll drink as much as they want, but liver damage isn't the only problem caused by excessive drinking. In the past year, there were 1,400 alcohol related deaths on college campuses and between 50,000 and 60,000 documented assaults, she said.\n"If a couple nights a week you get stinking drunk," she said, "you can have difficulty making it to class in the morning."\nAt the 10th Street house, the guys said they have rarely if ever missed class as a result of drinking, and as senior business students, they said they aren't worried about the value of their degrees declining because of the No. 1 beer ranking.\n"That ranking is coupled with a Top 10 business school ranking," said Lloyd (The Kelley School of Business was ranked No. 11 by the Princeton Review). "That just shows we have a work hard and play hard mentality"