This year, the number of alcohol-related overdoses has seen a 40-percent increase, and it hardly comes as a surprise.

According to the Mount Nittany Medical Center, in the first quarter of 2007, 109 students had visited the hospital because of excessive drinking, up from 79 over the same period in 2006.

Although an increase by 30 students in a population of more than 42,000 hardly represents the need for a large-scale initiative, something needs to be changed, and it needs to start with Penn State.

This freshman class is the largest in the university's history, and because inexperienced drinkers seem the most likely to drink themselves into an ambulance, the best way to curtail the epidemic would be to educate incoming students.

The First-year Testing, Counseling and Advising Program (FTCAP) is the perfect opportunity to do this. Adding forums for students who have made trips to the hospital and soon-to-be freshmen at FTCAP would greatly benefit all involved.

As it is, the mandatory class for those who receive an underage drinking citation is already a joke. Perhaps students cited for underage drinking should be required to speak with incoming freshmen about the dangers of drinking.

Penn State, however, probably wouldn't take that kind of step.

After all, the administration has agreed to cut sessions pertaining to sexual assault from FTCAP. Reworking first-year seminars to include lectures on orienting students to campus life is one solution, and revising the "Party Smart" program is another, as the current campaigns are failures partly because of the numbers and statistics they give the student body.

The university defines binge drinking as the consumption of four drinks or more for females and five drinks or more for males over the course of a night. Not only does that number not faze most students, but it's also a number most laugh at.

Saying that three out of four people do not binge drink means 25 percent, or more than 10,000 people, do.

Maybe Penn State can't change that. But maybe there's a way to make those who do drink do so in a more responsible manner.