How To Manage Teen Drinking (The Smart Way)

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When drinking is legal, they argue, it takes place in the open, where it can be supervised by police, security guards and even health-care workers. When the drinking age went up, the spigot wasn't turned off, it was simply moved underground--to homes or cars or frat-house basements--where no adult could keep an eye on things. When kids who are drinking on the sly do venture out, they often "pre-load" first, fueling up on as much alcohol as they can hold before the evening begins so that the buzz lasts as long as possible. As for the reduction in traffic fatalities? Skeptics believe it may have less to do with changing the drinking age than with the new mores about drunk driving and the more aggressive enforcement of DUI laws.

Doubtful about the value of the 21-year-old limit, administrators at Middlebury College in Vermont recently calculated how much federal highway money the state would lose were it to reduce the legal age to 18. Middlebury officials wanted to see if the school could afford to make up the difference. It couldn't (the figure was about $12.5 million last year), and the proposal died. But the idea didn't.

"The 21-year drinking age has not reduced drinking on campuses, it has probably increased it," says Middlebury president John McCardell. "Society expects us to graduate students who have been educated to drink responsibly. But society has severely circumscribed our ability to do that."

Other college administrators share McCardell's frustration. "If there were an 18- or 19-year-old drinking age, we could address the issues more favorably," says Dartmouth College President James Wright. As it is, "we can't go around sniffing students' breath or smelling their cups." Despite their complaints, college heads have been disinclined to make a public case for lowering the drinking age, knowing how controversial that would be. Meanwhile, on a number of campuses, administrators are employing what turns out to be a remarkably powerful tool to curb excessive drinking: simple information. When college students are asked how much drinking takes place on their campuses, they almost always guess too high. In a 1996 survey at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in New York, students said their peers were drinking five times a week. In truth, the answer was twice a week. In a different study, kids at 100 other campuses made similarly inflated estimates.

Hobart and Smith sociology professor H. Wesley Perkins, who conducted the 1996 study, was intrigued by these findings. If teenagers--conformers by temperament--believe drinking is rampant on campus, might they be more inclined to pick up the habit? If on the other hand, they knew that the heavy drinkers were not in the majority, might moderation suddenly seem more attractive?

In 1997 Hobart and William Smith spent about $2,000 to find out. With the help of posters and newspaper ads, college officials publicized the fact that a majority of students on campus drank twice a week or less, that the majority of seniors consumed four or fewer drinks at parties, and that three-quarters of the alcohol on campus was consumed by just one-third of the students. The same messages popped up as screen savers on university computers.