Fewer students have been reported for drinking and using drugs since USC raised its fines for doing so, but those fines are bringing in far more money.
As of Tuesday, 735 students had been reported for drinking this semester, which is down 25 percent from the same period in 2011, before the new sanctions were implemented, according to numbers compiled by the Office of Student Conduct.
And the office had seen just 83 drug cases, down 50 percent from 2011.
The drops were “steeper than I expected,” said Alisa Liggett, director of Student Conduct, and the decreases came after years of increases.
Plus, Liggett said, the numbers now include game day ejections, which may have skewed this year’s numbers upward. Students who are ejected are blocked from getting tickets later on in the season, which was another new sanction.
Liggett said that fewer students are coming back with second or third offenses and that fewer were going to the hospital because of drinking.
USC began charging higher fees last fall — $250 for drinking and $350 for drugs, on first offenses — and began notifying parents when their children had gotten in trouble. Before then, it charged a $50 fine for either kind of offense. Liggett said the new fees are close to average among Southeastern Conference schools.
“The $50 wasn’t doing anything,” she said.
How much money USC will make on the sanctions this year is not yet known. Last year, the fines totaled about $222,000, an increase of 264 percent in one year, according to Stacey Bradley, an associate vice president for student affairs.
Liggett said that money has helped her office increase its outreach efforts, hire more staff and handle cases more quickly. Students who are written up now have a hearing within a week or two, not months after the fact, she said.
The student conduct office’s budget also increased this year, rising about 23 percent to $543,366.
Outside of conduct cases, it’s hard to say how much students’ behavior has changed since the new sanctions went into effect.
An annual survey of USC students showed little difference in drinking habits. In 2012, 79 percent of students said they’d had a drink in the last 30 days, which was down slightly from 79.6 percent the year before.
But fewer students said they had smoked marijuana — 20.2 percent in 2012, compared to 28.4 percent the year before.
AlcoholEdu course surveys show that drinking habits among USC’s incoming students hasn’t changed, said Rhonda DiNovo, director of the Office of Substance Abuse Prevention and Education. The proportion of high-risk drinkers (26 percent) enrolling at USC is higher than the national average (19 percent).
“I think the success that we’re having with conduct cases being down is absolutely, positively related to the changes in policies that we’ve made,” DiNovo said.