WASHINGTON - Drinking kills 1,400 college students every year and plays a role in 70,000 cases of sexual assault and date rape on campus, a study released on Tuesday found.

A quarter of all U.S. college students have driven under the influence of alcohol, and 500,000 have been injured because of booze, concluded the survey, which was published by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

"The harm that college students do to themselves and others as a result of excessive drinking exceeds what many would have expected," said Ralph Hingson, a researcher at Boston University's School of Public Health who led the study, in a statement.

"Our data clearly point to the need for better interventions against high-risk drinking in this population."

Writing in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol, Hingson said the study used a range of sources including data on traffic deaths, figures from the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention and from medical examiners.

Other studies have found that about 40 percent of students binge drink, defined as quaffing five or more drinks in a row for men and four or more for women.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Hingson's study found those who drank the most are incoming freshmen, males, members of fraternities or sororities, and athletes.

Students at two-year institutions, religious schools, commuter schools, and predominantly or historically black colleges and universities drank the least.

"Although a minority of college students engage in high- risk drinking, all students, and their parents, faculty, and members of the surrounding community suffer the negative consequences of alcohol abuse, such as assault, vandalism and traffic accidents," said Edward Malloy, president of the University of Notre Dame, who helped write the report. "And I've lived in college dormitories for much of my adult life, so I know firsthand the impact irresponsible drinking has on the quality of residential life." The study said that simply providing students with information about the risks of drinking clearly does not work. What does work, it said, are carefully designed programs that go in-depth into the behaviors that lead to drinking, enforcement of minimum drinking age laws and restrictions on how many stores can sell alcohol in a certain area.

Schools may also consider reinstating classes on Fridays and Saturdays, thus shortening the weekend, designating more alcohol-free dormitories and disciplining those who violate alcohol policies.