As part of its plan to combat binge drinking, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will require all incoming freshmen to live in on-campus housing.

In 1997, MIT freshman Scott Krueger was found unconscious in the basement of the fraternity he was pledging with a 0.4 blood alcohol level. Krueger died four days later.

Krueger’s parents have been vocal in criticizing the school administration, claiming the reason for their son’s death was that he could not find adequate housing and felt pressured to join a fraternity just to have a place to live. Krueger’s parents also cited “inadequate” alcohol and housing policies.

This year, the University responded to the incident by paying the family $6 million and enacting an ordinance requiring all freshmen to live in university dorms. MIT will also increase supervision of Greek houses.

Of MIT’s 4,800 undergrads, 2,800 live in the 10 residence halls on campus. MIT has been hard-pressed to find housing for approximately 1,000 to 1,500 freshmen students. To address the rising number of freshmen, new residence halls are being constructed.

A recent survey of college students by the Harvard School of Public Health found binge drinking had risen dramatically during the year of Krueger’s death. According to the report, Harvard found that 22.7 percent of the college student population engaged in frequent binge drinking, up from 20.9 percent in 1997.

In a letter to the Krueger family, MIT President Charles Vest said, “The death of Scott as a freshman living in an MIT fraternity shows that our approach to alcohol education and policy, and our freshmen housing options, were inadequate.” Because MIT doesn’t have enough on-campus housing for freshmen, it is forced to support off-campus options such as fraternity and sorority houses, Vest suggested.

The economic impact of MIT’s move could be significant, said Stephen Malpezzi, a University of Wisconsin associate professor of business, real estate and urban land economics. Malpezzi said the magnitude of problems depends on the number of students moving in.

While protests against MIT’s new policy have been quiet, there are some who remain convinced the policy will do little to curb the campus’s drinking problem. According to Damien Brosnan, class of 2001 President of Inter-Fraternity Council that governs MIT’s fraternities, the dorms are as much a haven for drinking as fraternities.

“The dorms were just as much involved in underage drinking,” Brosnan said in a Wellesley News interview. “I don’t think it was our housing system that made [Scott’s death] the way it was. I think that it was an isolated incident, the way that it occurred. It was people being stupid, not thinking before they acted.”