High drinking age stunts students’ maturity rate

With spring break rapidly approaching, I’m going to tell you a little secret: College students drink. Oftentimes, a lot. What’s more, they do it illegally.

The national drinking age is an interesting anomaly, something we’ve long accepted begrudgingly without a second thought. After all, it does give us something to celebrate after turning 18 proves to be a bleak passage into adulthood. 

But if you really think about it, there’s a strong case to be made for lowering the national drinking age to 18. 

Making risky behaviors illegal will make our “rite of passage” risk-taking all the more risky. If students are afraid of being caught, they are less likely to help out in dangerous situations like  alcohol poisoning. According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, four out of five college students drink alcohol. According to the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth, almost half of all college drinking is done by those underage.

Consider this: If underage drinking was legal, then students would not look to alcohol as such a valued commodity. Thus, drinking wouldn’t be as adventurous and wild of an endeavor. Rather, it would be something anyone with some money and an ID could do. College students could then, ideally, live out their fascination with alcohol in a comparatively safer setting.

A study undertaken by the National Advisory Council on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism looked into the different factors that produce the phenomenon of drinking in college. This study ties drinking in college to the developmental process, elevated drinking levels associated with the college stage of life and pre-existing drinking problems. However, it also notes the significance of the college atmosphere. This includes the pairing of those who can legally drink with those who cannot, heightened alcohol advertising to college students and vast periods of unstructured time away from the supervision of parents. College students see drinking as an exciting and necessary aspect of college life, and often enter college with that assumption in mind. 

A relatively new developmental theory proposed by Jeffrey Arnett of The University of Maryland College Park has marked the years between 18 and 25 as a period of “emerging adulthood.” In a sense, demographic changes have led adolescents to enter a phase in their lives during which they are eager to “find themselves,” but unwilling to fully take on the responsibilities typically expected of adulthood. 

Could you blame them if the State doesn’t even consider them mature enough to legally enjoy a beer or glass of wine? I have little doubt that delayed access to alcohol plays a part in that trend. Because adolescents enter such a novel lifestyle later, they postpone other hallmark responsibilities of adulthood, leading to what has been critiqued as millennial deviance and coined “delayed adulthood.”

When you consider adulthood in the U.S., it is, in every sense but the legal right to drink, marked by turning 18. That makes a national drinking age of 21 quite ironic. Essentially, adolescents are told that, in the eyes of the law, they are fit to take on full responsibility for all aspects of their lives and considered productive members of society. Yet, they are deemed too irresponsible to take on the responsibilities that come along with drinking. 

Regardless of the points above, it seems unlikely that any legislative action will be taken to change the national drinking age. Those who oppose lowering the drinking age often argue that doing so would raise the risk of drunken driving, but this argument does not address the dangers of binge drinking and the reckless behavior associated with alcohol. 

As Brown University anthropologist Dwight B. Heath notes, “In general, the younger people start to drink the safer they are.” Heath, who has written extensively on the topic, is not advocating for young people to get drunk at an even earlier age. Rather, he recognizes that if alcohol lost its taboo and parents could more openly educate their children about proper alcohol consumption, fewer high school and college students would feel the need to indulge in what would be an already familiar commodity.  

It might be interesting to note, then, that there is no outright national ban on underage drinking. However, the National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984 effectively enacted a national drinking age of 21 when it threatened to punish states by cutting annual federal highway apportionment for allowing persons under 21 to purchase and possess alcohol. States enacted the outright bans themselves, which accounts for the variations in legality when it comes to underage drinking across the nation. 

What this means is that individual states control the legality of drinking. They could certainly choose to lower the drinking age to 18, as long as they were willing to receive a cut of up to 10 percent in their federal highway apportionment funding, approximately 2.5 billion that is relegated nationally. At the end of the day, I think it would be in their best interest to do so. 

Let’s just remember, after all, that college students drink. 

Bethel primarily writes about social issues and current events for The Pitt News. 

Write Bethel at beh56@pitt.edu.