"It was a lot bigger back then," says James Kenji Alt, a junior at MIT. "We used to bring kegs into the middle of Killian Court on Friday nights."

But the death of Krueger, whose blood alcohol was more than five times the legal limit, "sent shock waves out to a lot of schools," says Captain William B. Evans, commander of the Allston-Brighton police district.

"Because it occurred in a so-called elite school," says Henry Wechsler, director of the College Alcohol Study at the Harvard School of Public Health, "people thought, 'If it can happen there, it can happen anywhere.' The fact that it was at MIT gave it extra salience."

Now that MIT has come out of the lawsuit filed by Krueger's family $6 million poorer (the school settled with the family this September), the pressure is on both colleges and the city to puritanize student nightlife.

"It was a wake-up call for a lot of people, not only students and residents but public officials," Lehman says. "The Mayor [Thomas M. Menino] looked at it as a way of doing something proactive so this won't happen again...We had to start ensuring that the enforcement end was still in place. It wasn't lacking, but Scott Krueger's death breathed a bit more urgency into it."

No college wants a tragedy to occur. But these days, it seems, the threat of monetary retribution has incited university administrators to a new caution. The sense of vulnerability that has captured them after the incident is tangible.

"We still could have a Scott Krueger," said Herb A. Ross, Associate Vice President for Student Affairs at Boston University. "We know we're not immune."