Drinking Age: 18 or 21?

I was reading an article on how the presidents of many universities are signing petitions to spark dialogue and possibly even amend the legal drinking age.

I obviously don't know what arguments were made in favor of making the drinking age 21 back in the day, but I am willing to bet that much of it was based on supposed discrepancies in maturity levels between 18 and 21. But I believe that many people become irresponsible with drinking because of the novelty. With more exposure/experience with drinking people better understand the consequences and make better judgments when it comes to drinking. Maybe it is their maturity, but I believe it is a certain maturity that attaches itself exclusively to drinking as opposed to a personal maturity that comes with the different experiences one goes through from 18 to 21.

What many of the university presidents are saying is that may college students under the age of 21 are inclined to binge drink before they go out because they obviously cannot purchase alcohol once they are out. And to me, that makes sense. For most people, more than half of your college career you cannot legally drink while you see all your older friends drinking whenever and almost wherever they damn well please. I'm sure there is that feeling of exclusion that motivates younger people to binge particularly because sometimes those opportunities do not come very often. Alcohol is integrated and almost solidified into the college culture that you can't help but feel left out if you aren't 21.

But then again, there is that argument that by lowering the drinking age to 18 will only widen the spectrum of binge drinkers. Definitely a large group of drinkers fall in the 18-20 age range, and all of these people are illegal. By lowering the drinking age, it might only encourage more high school students to drink. And with almost all high school students living at home, it encourages them to drink elsewhere and only increasing the number of drunk drivers on the streets. Like I was talking about earlier, novelty plays a huge factor into the culture of drinking and I feel that with drinking being so new in the high school demographics, it might only worsen the drinking problem by getting it started at earlier ages.

I personally don't know where I stand on the issue. But I was pretty stubborn on keeping it 21. Now, I just don't know, haha.