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Virginia has 332 state-run liquor stores flung into all corners of the state. Some do big business. Others, not so much. The busiest ones, you'd guess -- mostly correctly -- are in the most populated places: Virginia Beach, Richmond, Fairfax County.

But, at No. 7 on the list, the store on South Main Street, Blacksburg, Va, less than a mile from the Virginia Tech campus. The two other liquor stores in Montgomery County combined didn't do the volume of that store. That's just one example of the noteworthy juxtaposition of a number of those top-selling stores (as measured by gallons sold) with college campuses.

We put the top 50 stores on a map to see how many lined up near Virginia's 42 four-year residential colleges.

Check out the University of Virginia. Just down Emmett Street are two of the top 50 stores.

And it's not just the big universities. Longwood University, in Farmville, has about 4,000 students -- and one of the top 50 stores just a little ways down Main Street.

Along with the top liquor stores, we also mapped licensed alcohol sellers busted for selling to under-age buyers. State ABC agents routinely conduct under-cover inspections of places licensed to sell beer and wine by sending in operatives who are actually 17-19 years old to buy alcohol. The inspections are essentially random, but where they're conducted can be influenced by the availability of under-age operatives and they can also be prompted by citizen complaints.

Between July 2008 and June 2009, licensees failed inspections 483 times. In the same period, nearly 4,200 inspections produced no violations, so the mass of sellers are following the law.

With nearly 500 of those violations on our map, naturally they're all over the state, but you can see on the map that quite a few of the red Xs marking them are, again, near college campuses.

Now in the DataSphere, the 2008 and 2009 graduation and drop-out rates for all Virginia high schools.

The 2009 data just came out today from the Virginia Department of Education, which we added to our existing database with the 2008 numbers.

Prior to that, Virginia calculated grad rates in a different way, so comparisons before that don't really wash. It's now called the "on-time graduation rate." There are break downs for subgroups including gender, race, homeless students, and more, and also break downs of diploma types.

Statewide, the grad rate improved from 82.1 percent to 83.2 percent. The drop out rate improved from 8.7 percent to 7.9 percent. Read the DOE news release here.

Just over a year after the Amethyst Inititive to re-examine the legal drinking age was launched, 135 college and university presidents have signed on, and just 27 of them are from public colleges.

That same ratio seems to be playing out in Virginia.

Of the seven Virginia college and university presidents who either signed on to the initiative or said they support it in a survey by The Roanoke Times, six lead private schools, and just one is at a public university: Charles Steger of Virginia Tech.

“Unfortunately, as a large university, Virginia Tech experiences the problems associated with college-age drinking all too often,” Steger said in a statement submitted as part of the survey. “The 'binge drinking’ rate at Virginia Tech is 58.4 percent, far above the national average of 42 percent.

“The Amethyst Initiative, fundamentally, seeks to open a nationwide dialogue on misuse of alcohol. I signed the initiative to help facilitate this discussion. I applaud and support that effort.”

In all, 18 of Virginia’s 44 four-year, residential colleges and universities in Virginia completed all or part of the survey, and two more who did not complete the survey have declared their support for the initiative on the Amethyst Initiative Web site.

Five of the schools that responded to the survey said they oppose the initiative, three of them public schools.

Another eight schools said they were undecided in the survey, six of them public.

You can see the first wave of survey responses here. You’ll find an interactive map of all the schools we surveyed and the schools' unabridged answers to the parts of the survey related to our coverage so far in our Under 21 series. The series looks at the Amethyst Initiative and college drinking in general.

The survey responses suggest relatively weak opposition to the initiative, and a lot of indecision about it.

That’s especially true among the state’s taxpayer-supported public colleges, for whom the notion that the 21-year drinking age has led to more clandestine and heavier drinking and ought to be re-considered seems to be a touchy one.

As Longwood University in Farmville pointed out in its survey response, supporting a re-consideration of the legal drinking age can be more complicated for a school that depends on taxpayers.

“We answer to a higher authority and our number one priority has always been, and continues to be, the safety and security of our students,” the school said. “It’s a matter of trust between our students, their parents and us.”

The University of Virginia’s John Casteen, who also said he’s undecided, acknowledged in an address to parents in August 2008 that changing the drinking age to 18 would make life simpler for college administrators, who would then have student bodies almost uniformly of legal drinking age. But he isn’t convinced it would be a good idea on the whole.

“I’ve encouraged the people involved in this Amethyst Initiative … to lay out their evidence to show how they can assert that there is no appreciable difference between behavior at age 18 and behavior at age 21,” he said. “I fear sometimes that part of the motive here is to make the lives of college deans and dorm head residents, and so on, easier. I don’t think that’s the point. But I’m also perfectly willing to be persuaded by good evidence.”

Radford University’s Penelope Kyle found the same lack of compelling evidence reason enough to oppose the initiative.

“There is still no compelling evidence that clearly demonstrates that lowering the drinking age to 18 would, in fact, ameliorate problematic drinking behaviors of college students,” the university said in accounting for Kyle’s position.

While public colleges seem reluctant to sign on, three schools with religious affiliations who responded to the survey support the initiative.

Billy Greer, president of the United Methodist Church-affiliated Virginia Wesleyan, “believes that the proposed 18-year-old requirement for drinking alcoholic beverages is more in line with both the reality of what already occurs and the appropriate rights for that age individual,” the college said in its statement.

A number of religious schools that didn’t complete the survey, such as Regent University and Patrick Henry College, oppose drinking in general, regardless of age.

Generally, the data you find in the DataSphere is found data. It's tables and spreadsheets and databases we've found on government Websites, or obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

But this summer, a database we wanted didn't exist, so we set out to build it ourselves. As part of our ongoing series on the Amethyst Initiative to re-examine the legal drinking age and college drinking in general, we sent a survey to 44 Virginia colleges to gather data on their alcohol policies, enforcement of them, the number of alcohol related disciplinary actions on campus, and each college president's position on the Amethyst Initiative.

The results are in, and you can see the first wave of data from the survey now. It's an interactive map with markers for each of the colleges we surveyed, a digest of part of their responses, and a link to their unabridged answers to some of the questions.

The map and data, along with all of our coverage in the series are collected on a site devoted to our series.

We sent the survey only to four-year colleges with on campus housing, whether public or private. In other words, schools offering some version of traditional campus life. Fewer than half the colleges completed the survey, while several more declined to complete for various reasons, but in most cases because of concerns about how the questions were phrased or that their responses would be handled fairly in being compared to other schools. The remainder simply didn't respond at all.

Still, there's plenty to be learned from the responses we did get. To begin with, we're looking at which school presidents support the Amethyst Initiative, and which don't. As you'll read in my analysis, the idea of re-considering the legal drinking age and possibly lowering it appears to be generating only weak opposition in Virginia. The largest block of those presidents whose positions we documented are undecided.

We're not done with the data, and the most interesting stuff may be yet to come.  With the next installment in the series, we'll be rolling out more of the schools' responses, and layering other data onto the map, such as where the highest volume liquor stores are located in relation to college campuses, where other alcohol sellers are located, and which of them have been caught selling to underage buyers.

In the meantime, post your questions and comments here. I'll be glad to get them.

If you're thinking the answer is bus exhaust, that smell from the cafeteria on fish stick day, second-hand smoke or maybe pot, you've got some other things to consider, according to USA Today.

The national newspaper has released a special report called "The Smokestack Effect: Toxic Air and America's Schools," which documents air quality around 128,000 public, private and parochial schools. You can search the newspaper's database to see how your school ranks. Enter the name of a specific school, search by your locality, or an entire state. Results are mapped.

And, if you're kids go to a school in Dublin, Va., or the Raleigh Court/Virginia Heights area of Roanoke, prepare to be disturbed. Read more »

From an Indiana University study of student loan default rates:

Measures of academic momentum and degree completion and the
combination of debt load, number of dependents, and income—factors that
influence one’s ability to repay a loan—exert the greatest influence on the
likelihood of default. Other factors that influence the odds that students may
default include students’ family income, parental education, academic ability,
ethnicity, and age. We found no evidence that the type of institution attended is
a good predictor of the loan repayment behavior of students.

Thanks for that to alert reader Jeff Arthur, who also happens to be vice-president of information systems and financial aid at ECPI College of Technology. Jeff referenced the study in a comment last week, and kindly passed on that and a bunch of other info to inform the discussion of the federal student loan default rates now viewable in the DataSphere.

Read more »

Nearly 3.5 million federal student loans came due for repayment in 2005. By the end of the year, nearly five percent were in default for non-payment. That's bad enough, but it's actually a gargantuan improvement over 15 years earlier, when nearly one in four of the same loans were in default. Check out the default figures for over 5,000 U.S. colleges for 2003 through 2005 now in the DataSphere. The data comes from the U.S. Department of Education.

You can make a number of assumptions from those figures. Some people had legitimate hardships and couldn't pay (although deferments are an option in some circumstances), while others no doubt just shirked their responsibility.

But, as the U.S. Department of education sees it, those numbers reflect not only on the borrowers, but on the colleges who awarded the loans in the first place.

Read more »

If you haven't read David Harrison's fine story on Hurt Park Elementary School from Sunday's paper, please do. It's a terrific story of a school community succeeding despite the currents running against it. It's based in part on demographic, enrollment and poverty data on Roanoke schools you can search in the DataSphere.

Hurt Park is in a number of ways emblematic of the trends in Roanoke that teachers and administrators are up against. The short-hand is the city school system is ever more "urban" each year. What that means is, the school system has increasing numbers of both minorities and children in poverty -- groups which historically have struggled academically. That's the oft-talked about "achievement gap." That trend is coupled with decreasing numbers of white and middle-class and affluent children, who tend to have greater academic success. And all this is happening in atmosphere of intense accountability for public schools, in which all students have to achieve, regardless of history and well-documented achievement gaps.

Look at Highland Park Elementary, for example. In 1990, about 31 percent of students were poor enough to be eligible for free or reduced-price lunch programs. Last year, that number hit 71 percent. Meanwhile, the total enrollment at the school has dropped by more than 50 percent.

But what do these demographic trends mean outside the school system? Demographers -- along with common sense -- tell you that, if our youngest residents are trending poor, that's what the adults in the city will look like in 15 or 20 years.

Even mentioning that out loud potentially exacerbates the "white flight" that's apparently going on, I know. But it's a statistical reality that matters. Increasing numbers of lower wage earners means less home-ownership, less liquid cash for city businesses, a diminishing tax base, and on and on.

The city is all about trying to reverse the trend. Witness the push for more new and higher-end housing in the city -- most especially on city-owned parcels, like at Colonial Green on Colonial Avenue or at Brambleton Avenue and Overland Drive. It's the same idea behind so far fruitless efforts to develop Countryside Golf Course. Then there's the push to revitalize the city's older core with projects like the Day Avenue renovation.

There seems to be a lot going on, but it is enough to turn the tide? Is housing the answer, or is the better chance for success in creating a school system that helps ensure that kids who are in poverty now don't grow up to become poor adults? Not that either is an easy -- or exclusive -- solution, mind you.