The Harvard researchers indicate, however, that age may not be the chief factor. Their study found a strong link between heavy alcohol use and drinking cultures at many colleges, where there are heavily marketed cheap alcohol, high-volume sellers and weak enforcement of the law by the schools, states or both.
Well duh, I didnt need research to tell me that.
A few schools, including the University of Nebraska and the University of Rhode Island, have taken sensible steps like banning beer kegs, offering housing where alcohol and tobacco are banned and requiring students to take courses on responsible drinking.
That may be a good mid point between total bans and just allowing whatever.
I'd like to dream that someday we can survive without having a drinking age, and without having to require courses on how to drink responsibly--you would think that, with alcohol use so ingrained in our culture, that certain behavioral aspects would get picked up, but that's not the case. So rather than parents talking to their kids about alcohol and being there during the initial experiments, the clam up about it, and you get the same results as abstinence-only education: kids doing stupid things and not understanding why they are stupid.
We had a substance-free house at my undergrad where you could apply to live. Nobody was ever forced to, because that would have ruined it (sending people with drinking problems into a house full of non-drinkers doesn't really work).
The 21-year-old floor is not the problem. It is the culture of drinking at school.
Exactly, culture.
[/quote]
Where do we start? I'm too old to have an effect on my peers, mostly because my peers are all old like me. I didn't drink until I was 21 (because I didn't feel like I was ready, and didn't want the hassle of avoiding police), and I'd like to think I was setting an example by that, but mostly people probably just thought I was weird.