Considering what I’ve heard from Dartmouth alums and friends/relatives who work there, two comments:
http://news.yahoo.com/dartmouth-college-bans-hard-liquor-booze-limits-improve-205446575.html
Not letting legal adults 18-20 years old drink has been forgetting (and repeating) what happened during the Prohibition era.
this is destined for epic failure
Agreed , this is a bad idea and will likely drive drinking “underground” where there is even less supervision and it gets more dangerous. I’d love to see wine and beer legal for 18+ and hard alcohol not until 21.
Really? They are requiring 18-20 year olds to follow the law. They are setting an example by agreeing not to serve hard alcohol at university functions. They are stating to these students, who agree to the rules when they apply, that they are going to enforce those rules (which implies they are going to overlook beer and wine violations, which they probably do now).
When I went to school in the dark ages, we could buy 3.2 beer and drink in restaurants (usually pizza or burger places) at 18-20, and then at real bars at 21. We were all fairly happy with that law and for the most part it was easier to just go to 3.2 bars than to sneak into bars. The big problems happened jr/sr year when some of my friends turned 21 and then I wanted to go to the real bars with them. There is always going to be a cut off/cross over age, whether it is 18 or 21.
But if I went to Dartmouth and could drink beer and wine without risk of getting thrown out of school or drinking hard alcohol with a big risk of being tossed out of school, I’d go for the safe option. I think this hard line position has to come from the big name schools. If it’s the rule at Dartmouth, will the applications go down? I doubt it.
LOL
I think it is worth a try. They aren’t trying to ban alcohol. They are trying to shift the drinking to more beer and wine and away from hard liquor.
Colleges don’t need to prevent drinking, but they do need to get it more under control.
I’ve had beers stronger than that.
What is a 3.2 bar?
@happy1 What about the 18 year olds still in high school? This would give high schoolers of all ages even more access to alcohol. Plus, public K12 school systems would likely have to create “dry campuses” and enforce alcohol laws way more (regular breathalyzer tests, ,more security, etc.), costing the government money.
Otherwise, I’d be all for beer/wine age limits lowered. Maybe upon graduation from high school and at least age 18? However, this would be tricky for dropouts and other cases.
Purely from a residential college point of view, any age cutoffs within the age range of traditional college students are problematic in terms of making it easy for drinking age students to buy alcohol and provide it to underage students in an underground unsupervised manner, making enforcement more difficult. So either 18 or >=22 would be preferred from this point of view.
Of course, the residential college point of view is not the only relevant one in the discussion about what the drinking age should be.
KMizzle - I’d have no problem with making legal age after HS graduation if someone can figure out how to do that. But unfortunately even HS kids who want to get alcohol are typically able to find it.
Do you know that until the early to mid 1980s the legal drinking age in most states was 18?
The drinking age was 18 when I was in high school, and we had no problem getting beer as most of the seniors were 18 or even 19. There was a university in our town but those students were very happy drinking in ‘their’ bars (mostly beer). It was actually a much better system before the legal age went to 21 for everything. We drank mostly beer, we didn’t feel the need to get crazy drunk all the time, binge drinking wasn’t as common.
3.2 beer is a lighter alcohol beer. It is 3.2% alcohol by weight (or is it volume?) and ‘real’ beer is usually about 5% by volume (or is it weight? Whichever one is, the other is the opposite so they are not that far off in potency). Some states allowed this for 18-20 year olds, but it was sold in grocery stores and some restaurants and bars because the establishment had to sell food. Two different types of liquor licenses.
You know… it’s so weird… it’s almost like they already have a substance that is legal for 18 year olds and banned in high schools. (Hint: it’s tobacco)
And sometimes, just sometimes, the students have to follow the law, whether in high school or college. There are a lot of things some high school students can do that others can’t - drive, smoke, work in certain places, buy lottery tickets, go to gambling places. Sometimes life is just unfair and you are on one side of the line while your friends are on another.
Personally, I think calling these students adults is a little silly. What adult things do they do exactly?
At age 18, many “adult” rights and responsibilities occur. For example:
Of course, some things occur at other ages:
Parental control and responsibility ends for a kid on a meal plan in a dorm who parties far too much and would not be there at all if someone else wasn’t paying tuition? There are posts on this forum from parents genuinely wondering if their adult can iron a shirt or make a sandwich. You are joking right?
Yes, should have written that parental control and responsibility end for matters other than college funding. Actually, parental responsibility ends, but parental control does not end – funding for the kid’s college is completely voluntary for the parent, and the parent can use that as a means of controlling the adult kid.
That is one way to look at it I suppose. All of this drinking and the accompanying trouble does not sound very adulty to me. And, I have a feeling when it gets really bad mom and dad will be involved somehow in cleaning up their adult’s mess. That’s if the adult is one of the lucky ones which does seem to correlate pretty highly with the most irresponsible ones. Coincidence? Perhaps.