Trying to curb students’ “Thirsty Thursday” tradition of bar crawls and party hopping, professors at a Missouri college are urging universities to mandate Friday classes to encourage students to stay sober for at least one more night each week.

Instituting more Friday classes would eliminate students’ alcohol-fueled three-day weekends and would be less expensive and equally effective as other projects aimed at limiting campus drinking, according to a University of Missouri-Columbia study.

College Student Alcohol Consumption Day of the Week and Class Schedule, authored by the school’s professor of quantitative psychology, Phillip Wood, and Kenneth Sher and Patricia Rutledge of the school’s Midwest Alcoholism Research Center, says students often avoid taking classes before noon on Fridays so they can party without stumbling into class the next day hungover or being faced with the decision to skip morning class.

Though Wood said Friday-morning classes are not a “magical pill” for halting Thursday night drinking, he said they will encourage students to play it more low-key on the eve of the weekend.

“Having more Friday classes, early Friday classes or tests on Friday seem to be a pretty cost-effective way of reducing college drinking,” Wood said in a university press release.

National Council on Alcoholism ‘ Drug Dependence President Robert Lindsey said schools have a responsibility to develop programs to cut down drinking.

“An environment which promotes and condones excessive binge drinking will certainly produce more alcohol-related problems,” Lindsey said.

According to the 2006 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 18-to 22-year-olds enrolled fulltime in college are more likely to binge drink than part-time students.

Some students say no measures will stop them from living it up on weekday nights.

“[Thursday] feels like the beginning of the weekend,” said College of Arts and Sciences junior Ricky Silvia. “I try to make my schedule so that I have class as late as possible on Fridays because most Thursdays I will go out.

“It’s not hard to get to, but sometimes I’m still out of it from the night before,” he added.

Silvia said his weekends sometime start even earlier.

“There are times where I have gone out depending upon what is going on,” he said. “If I do go out I usually try to make it to class the next day, but there have been times where I’ve skipped them from being too tired or hungover.”