The students are paying for college. They can choose to party or study or do both like most kids. They are old enough to make those decisions.
2 things.
Lower the drinking age to 18. If you’re old enough to join the military and die fighting for your country, you’re old enough to buy a beer.
More responsibility by the parents. Introduce the kids to alcohol at home early on. Have a glass of wine with dinner. Take the mystery out of it so it won’t become the magical elixir of adults in their minds.
Hasn’t it been shown that introducing teenagers and kids to alcohol early on doesn’t curb drinking in the future?
^ Don’t know about the statistics, but from personal experience…
In my birth country the drinking age is 18. My peers over there are more responsible drinkers than the ones I go to school with here.
@Lilliana330 18 years old it not considered “early on” on the age timeline.
Early drinking is linked to more drinking problems later on, but that’s because most studies of early drinking have been done in adolescents who started drinking on their own, not people who were introduced to a bit of beer by their parents. There’s a big difference between your mom giving you a sip of her pina colada at 14 and starting to drink with your delinquent friends at 14.
Also, no, most students don’t binge drink (and most underaged drinking is not binge drinking). A 1995 study of drinking behaviors of a representative sample of over 14,000 college students found that 44% of them - 50% of the males, and 39% of the females - had ever binge drunk. A more recent study conducted in 2003 found much smaller prevalences - only 26% of people between the ages 18-20 had engaged in binge-drinking, compared to 32% of people in the 21-25 age range. (Personally, I have to say that I drank more in my first two years of graduate school than I did in my college years, lol.) I think people don’t outgrow their drinking behaviors at 20-21; I think the party/drinking lifestyle, if you have it, probably doesn’t start to extinguish until around the late 20s to early 30s. And even then, we still like getting drunk every now and then, maybe just in our own kitchens instead of a skeevy bar.
I actually think getting accidentally drunk is maybe more on the irresponsible spectrum than deliberately getting drunk, although context matters. When you plan to get drunk you can plan for the aftermath - having friends who will get you home safe, not driving, how much you want to drink, etc. When it happens accidentally and you’re not prepared that can lead to some last-minute irresponsible decisions, although mature students can usually figure something out (for example…I park in a deck that allows overnight parking so that in the event I need to take a taxi home…)
There’s a difference between underaged drinking and problematic drinking. Some people drink problematically without being underaged, and some underaged drinkers drink pretty responsibly. In fact, the drunkest I’ve ever been I think I was like 23 or 24, and not underaged. I definitely drank more legally than I ever did before it was legal (but for me that was at 20, because I spent the second half of the year I was 20 in Europe).
@niquiii77 True, true. Although some of them began trying stuff around 13 with their parents.
“There’s a big difference between your mom giving you a sip of her pina colada at 14 and starting to drink with your delinquent friends at 14.”
Yuup
I don’t really think it’s all that sensible to try to change anything. A lot of college kids drink. This isn’t because of a lack of education about the dangers of drinking in the majority of cases…it is simply because they want to drink. It is an enjoyable thing to do in large groups. Obviously people should be educated about what it has the possibility of doing, but beyond that it’s largely up to personal choice.
@comfortablycurt ^^^ Which is precisely why the age should be changed, so that people can enjoy the personal freedoms they deserve without breaking the law
@Lilliana330 , I agree completely. When kids are 18, 19, or 20, they are considered legally old enough to vote for the president or join the military. But they can’t have a beer? Come on now…
I actually agree about lowering the drinking age.