These Colleges Produce The Most Tweets About Drinking & Getting Hammered

Ancient Proverb: “If you go out drinking, but don’t post about it on social media, did it really happen?”
When it comes to gathering data on the activities of college kids, Twitter is a good place to start. At least, that was the idea behind a recent analysis conducted by the content marketing firm Fractl. Over the course of the 2014/2015 school year, all the alcohol-related tweets—posts including keywords like “drunk,” “drinking,” “alcohol,” “booze,” “beer” or “wine”—that were made within 3 miles of the center of campus were tallied up.
The rankings were then calculated by applying the number per capita, based on the school’s enrollment. The results have been posted to CollegeStats.org. There are two lists: one for “large schools” and another for “medium schools.” In this analysis, “large schools” are defined as colleges where enrollment exceeds 15,000 students, while “medium schools” have 10,000 to 15,000 students.
Here are the top ten largest universities with the most drinking-tweets per capita:
(Drunken drum roll, please)

The Top 10 Large Schools

1. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
2. West Virginia University
3. Virginia Commonwealth University
4. Ohio University
5. California State University, Chico
6. Indiana University of Pennsylvania
7. University of South Carolina
8. Boise State University
9. Eastern Michigan University
10. Bowling Green State University

And, now, the drunkest “medium schools”:
(Cue another unrhythmic drum roll)

The Top 10 Midsized Schools

1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2. Savannah College of Art and Design
3. College of Charleston
4. Johnson & Wales University
5. Tufts University
6. Strayer University
7. University of Southern Maine
8. Yale University
9. University of Michigan-Flint
10. University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

It’s important to note that this analysis looked at geolocated tweets, which means they’re organized by location. So, it’s possible that some of them were made by people who weren’t students. However, many of the schools in these lists have residential campuses, so it’s unlikely that there were enough non-students posting in that location to make a difference.
So what’s the moral of the story here? College kids (and those surrounding them) love to drink to get drunk. Just like the rest of us. They also love to brag about it on Twitter. Noted.