At the same time, the studies made clear that much is beyond colleges’ control. Half of students had started binge drinking before they got to campus.

Advocates and policy makers sensed an opportunity. The United States Department of Education established the Higher Education Center for Alcohol, Drug Use and Violence Prevention, which provided research, training and technical assistance. Mr. Wechsler’s findings sparked a 10-campus experiment to try to bring drinking under control. Focusing on colleges with higher-than-average rates of binge drinking, the project aimed to prove that by working with community partners to change the environment, colleges have the power to shift student behavior. The Johnson foundation put more than $17 million into the project, which was conducted with the American Medical Association over a 12-year period.

But early results showed that in the first few years, half of the colleges involved did not try much of anything. The other half reported “significant although small” improvements in drinking behavior. Meanwhile, a survey of about 750 college presidents found that they were sticking to what they had always done, focusing on arguably effective “social norming” campaigns, which aim to curb students’ drinking with the message that their peers do not drink as much as it seems. Today a number of colleges that participated in the lengthy experiment still struggle with students’ alcohol problems.

Several colleges developed new programs: training servers, notifying parents when underage students were caught drinking and coordinating enforcement with the local police. Setbacks, however, were common. Louisiana State University found local bar owners hostile to the idea of scaling back happy hours or drink specials. At the University of Colorado at Boulder, the campus-community coalition had little authority. To appeal to local businesses, a new mayor in Newark, Del., weakened regulations on selling alcohol near dormitories at the public flagship university.

The following years saw the end of several major projects. Mr. Wechsler’s College Alcohol Study wrapped up in 2006, having surveyed 50,000 students and produced reams of research. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation shifted its attention elsewhere. The Amethyst Initiative, a campaign by more than 100 college presidents to reconsider the legal drinking age, came and quickly went. And in 2012, funding cuts eliminated the federal center that had guided colleges on preventing alcohol and drug abuse.

Jim Yong Kim, a physician with a public-health background who was president of Dartmouth College, attempted to drag the issue back into the spotlight, announcing an intensive, public-health and data-driven approach to dealing with campus drinking. He used his influence to drum up participation from 32 institutions in the National College Health Improvement Program’s Learning Collaborative on High-Risk Drinking and secured money to keep it going for two years. But when he left Dartmouth to lead the World Bank, in 2012, the leadership and the money dried up. The project issued its first and final report this year.