Irish Americans and others are gearing up and putting on the green for St. Patrick’s Day parades and celebrations. In more than a few cases, revelry will include drinking.

But a relatively new phenomenon has been popping up in some college towns to get a jump on the holiday and expand the festivities to drunken rowdiness.

As if colleges didn’t have enough to worry about when it comes to excessive drinking on campus, now some colleges are dealing with unofficial pre-St. Patrick’s Day events that are little more than excuses for public drunkenness and dangerous behavior.

Because the actual St. Patrick’s Day celebration often arrives when college students are away from campus for spring break, some campuses have seen momentum building for massive and out of control pre-St. Patrick’s Day celebrations. Some stories suggest students have created the events; other stories say local bars and restaurants encouraged the events to boost the booze business before students leave for spring break. At Penn State’s main campus in State College, the event reportedly began in 2007.

The parties attract many young people from off campus and have resulted in dozens of arrests, causing serious problems.

Last weekend, Indiana University of Pennsylvania was in the news for a all the wrong reasons — a pre-St. Patrick’s Day binge drinking event produced crowds of several hundred rowdy students. It was the second year for such a disturbance at IUP.

Also last weekend, a larger crowd of drunken young people at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst brought out police in riot gear and ended with 73 students being arrested.

In Massachusetts, the event is known as the “Blarney Blowout.” At Penn State, it’s known as “State Patty’s Day.”

Starting last year and repeating this year, Penn State officials took a novel approach to containing the alcohol abuse, rowdiness and danger associated with State Patty’s Day by paying bars to not serve alcohol. The plan uses parking fine money collected by police at the prior year’s State Patty’s Day weekends and pays bars an amount approximating their expected profits for alcohol sales, with smaller bars getting about $5,000.

Last year, the arrangement led to the closure of 34 of 35 bars in downtown State College. This year, beer distributors have become part of the program, which should further dampen the spirits and maybe cause the event simply fade and die.

PSU officials suggest their system has helped but has not eliminated serious problems. In 2013, the first year of Penn State’s program to pay bars to be closed, arrests related to State Patty’s Day fell by 37 percent. This year, arrests dropped by another 47 percent.

Excessive drinking and college have long been associated and probably will remain linked as young people test their newfound freedom and experiment with alcohol. But the recent trends of massive crowds of publicly intoxicated people seem to be heading in an even more troubling direction. College students might think it’s fun, but if parents begin to associate certain colleges with dangerous levels of alcohol abuse and partying, they might encourage their children to go to college somewhere else.

All colleges — as do all parents — have a responsibility to educate students about the life-threatening dangers of alcohol poisoning and to warn that there will consequences for excessive drinking, including arrests, fines and possibly expulsion from school.

Penn State deserves credit for its creative approach — paying bars and beer distributors to be closed that day — but State Patty’s Day should never have been allowed to get to the point that it has to require cash payments to persuade bars to close.

Other schools need to be just as serious and creative in shutting down these dangerous drunkfests.