Staff Writer- August von Seth
In 1986, U.S. President Ronald Reagan concocted a witticism that would go down in history: The nine most terrifying words in the English language are “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” Though it hadn’t passed through the lips of the president before that fateful news conference in Chicago, Illinois, any contemporary political observer worth their salt would have pointed out that the line summed up Mr. Reagan’s lifelong political ambitions with notable precision.
Fifteen years earlier, the groundwork was laid for a bitter political controversy when Congress passed the 26th Amendment, lowering the voting age from 21 to 18. Seeing the writing on the wall, nearly 30 U.S. states in turn standardized their minimum legal drinking age.
Coupled with the fact that drivers in the U.S. can be as young as 14, it should have come as no surprise that increased access to alcohol would cause at least a temporary upswing in youth DUI cases, some of which tragically led to a fatal outcome. As pressure mounted from lobbying groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving, the proverbial hot potato landed in the lap of the Reagan administration, which moved to block federal funding unless states hastily raised their age limits for alcoholic consumption.
To administration officials, the quick fix was likely an easy one. Yet, punchy rhetorical quips can only take you so far. Their narrow ideological worldview obscured another, more ambitiously sensible option: raising the minimum driving age as a first step to investing in public transport, letting buses and trains shuttle wasted teenagers from the bar without raising anyone’s risk for serious bodily harm.
The implied meaning for young adults across the United States was that their individual freedom mattered less than ideologically entrenched notions of freedom from government intervention, in this case, from publicly funded buses traversing rural roads once or twice an hour.
Today, the hangover from Reagan’s 1984 National Drinking Age Act has reached its zenith, and college students are bearing the brunt.
Since the dawn of human civilization, members of our species have consumed various intoxicating substances while spending time together. While some of us may have legitimate objections, social drinking is here to stay, and no amount of red tape is going to change that.
The structure of these regulations can, however, alter the way it is practiced. Many young adults, for example, want a social life not devoid of the occasional drink—but refuse to resort to shady dealers for a fake ID card. For some, that plays a serious role in deciding to go to college, with 27% of college students listing partying as a reason to attend higher education, according to a study by Niznik Behavioral Health, a healthcare provider based in Texas.
Underaged yet extroverted students who do not reject alcohol, then, generally turn to the sort of private, unofficial house parties commonly seen across college campuses for their desired serving of alcohol-infused social interaction.
Regrettably, this sort of nightlife venue nearly always falls short of comparable options available to the general public. That may have something to do with the usual suspects hosting a considerable share of these events: adolescent boys whose idea of a good time is maximizing the density of bodies and red solo cups within an enclosed, not rarely poorly ventilated, living space.
Neither is the selected assortment of alcoholic beverages particularly enthralling when measured against that of any regular bar. Yet, for some young adult attendees living away from home for the first time, it is tantamount to forbidden fruit, requiring no modicum of moderation since its consumption alone already theoretically merits police attention.
(*Trigger Warning: Discussion of SA) Moreover, to a higher degree than public areas, house parties are ripe grounds for sexual exploitation. Where there is no bartender or prying eyes of strangers of diverse ages and backgrounds, there is only the lord of the flies and his friends living one wrong turn in the corridor away. As has been reported in these pages previously, more than one in four women are sexually assaulted in college; for men, that figure is one in ten.
Another downside to this type of college party is the risk of nightlife monopolization due to socially domineering or cliquish behavior from the side of the hosts. Roughly the same share of people who go to college to party totally abstain from life beyond the classroom, recent research from data analysis group Inside Higher Ed shows, with a 28% non-participation rate among students aged 18-24. The back-alley nature of house parties does little to drive that number down.
This means that a considerable share of underaged college students in the United States either force themselves to stay content with subpar, questionable nightlife venues or withdraw from socializing entirely.
Clearly, some sort of change is overdue. If not on the poor merits of private house parties alone, then at least to reverse current trends where Baby Boomers are set to outshine Gen Z on the social playing field. The Economist reported last year that about as many Americans over the age of 55 “ever have occasion to consume alcoholic beverages” as individuals 18 to 34. All the while, older people are having increasingly more sex while young adults are fading into sexual obscurity. What does that say about us as a generation?
There is a sturdy barrier between some college students and a healthy social life. Part of the problem is a cadre of politicians who would rather set arbitrary age limits than momentarily face the wrath of reactionary lobbying organizations and would never dare break the mold and propose reliable public transport networks that extend beyond urban centers—preferably featuring a slightly richer itinerary of hours and stops than, say, the Gus Bus; where designated drivers are professionals getting paid for keeping the unfit from taking the wheel.
In the characteristically catchy words of Mr. Reagan, the time has come to tear down this wall. Lawmakers ought to sober up and let the average college student go to a bar with friends like the adults the law otherwise tells them they are.