The drinking age: Should it be lowered to 18?

last updated 8 January 2015

College drinking, one study estimates, kills some 1,700 students annually. It causes 599,000 injuries. It results in 97,000 sexual assaults or date rapes. Now, said the Los Angeles Times in an editorial, more than 100 college and university presidents are fighting back by circulating a nationwide petition calling on the country to “rethink the drinking age.” It may sound counter-intuitive, but the academics say the best response to underage binge drinking is to lower the legal drinking age to 18. The heads of Middlebury, Colgate, and other schools argue that “raising the drinking age to 21, which the federal government effectively forced states to do in the early 1980s,” has only enhanced the allure of alcohol for freshmen and sophomores. Rather than learn to drink responsibly in bars and supervised settings, they drink clandestinely, chugging down huge quantities to get drunk quickly. Making alcohol taboo, the presidents argue, just hasn’t worked. “How many times,” they are asking, “must we relearn the lessons of Prohibition?”

It’s a good question, said Marc Fisher in WashingtonPost.com. “When I was in college three decades ago, 18-year-olds could drink openly and legally. The result—of course, with plenty of extreme exceptions—was that kids learned moderation.” At 18, said the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, students are legally entitled to vote, drive, and volunteer to die for their country. But they’re not mature enough to buy a mug of beer? That’s inherently unfair.

These arguments are nonsensical, said the Portland Oregonian. The college presidents seem to believe that if 18-year-olds are told they can drink, they’ll no longer want to. Yet they offer not “one iota of evidence” to support this specious “reverse psychology.” Maybe that’s because there is no evidence, said Steve Chapman in the Chicago Tribune. In fact, a University of Michigan study has found no increase in binge drinking since 1988, when 21 became the legal drinking age. On the other hand, there’s plenty of evidence that an older drinking age limits alcohol-related traffic fatalities. Among 16- to 20-year-olds, those fatalities have been cut in half since 1988. That’s about 900 lives a year. As for fairness, there’s good reason to let 18-year-olds serve in the Army but not buy a beer. “Among the qualities that make 18-year-olds such good soldiers are their fearlessness and their sense of immortality—traits that do not mix well with alcohol.” With their misguided petition, 100 college presidents have again proved that academia is utterly disconnected from the real world.