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It’s been 23 years since former President Ronald Regan signed the National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984, but you wouldn’t know it by the scene on most college campuses. Apparently, mere laws can’t keep resourceful, well-educated young adults from getting what they want. And after a long week of classes and studying, what they want is beer.

Underage drinking on college campuses isn’t anything new. Ever since the law went in the books, students have been breaking it, but while 18-20 year old co-eds practice their beer pong form, university presidents are biting their fingernails in anticipation of the next alcohol-induced tragedy and trying to think of ways to curb the perceived underage drinking epidemic. The former president of Vermont’s Middlebury College, John McCardell Jr., has an idea, but it’s not what you think.

In 2004, after retiring from the college presidency to return to teaching, McCardell wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times titled “What Your College President Didn’t Tell You.” After criticizing the contemporary tenure system and downplaying the importance of the heralded student/faculty ratio, McCardell had this straightforward message for lawmakers: “the 21-year-old drinking age is bad social policy and terrible law.”

Um. What?

An administrator, a parent and a respected figure in higher education had finally said what everyone outside of the MADD camp had been thinking since the ink dried on Regan’s signature. Thank god.

When the national minimum drinking age went into effect, it was intended to stop the climbing rate of alcohol related traffic fatalities in the 1980’s, but legal age 21 has been impressively ineffective at making young people drink less. In fact, according to data published by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration in 2002, more teens and young adults are drinking now than before the drinking age was raised. In 1984, 29.7% of 12-17 year olds reported using alcohol. By 2002 that number had climbed to 43.4%.

What legal age 21 has succeeded in doing is convincing young adults to hide their drinking habits. Since underage boozers can’t go to bars to get liquored up, house parties have become their regular social fix and those shiny metal shrines they’re all gathered around? The beloved keg.

“Our latter-day prohibitionists have driven drinking behind closed doors and underground,” McCardell says in “What Your College President Didn’t Tell You. “This is the hard lesson of prohibition that each generation must relearn.” Now he’s ready to school the teetotalers.

Earlier this year McCardell launched Choose Responsibility, a non-profit dedicated lowering the drinking age to 18 and to reopening the discussion on alcohol’s role in the U.S.

“The reality is that alcohol is a presence in the lives of these young people,” McCardell says. “The law does not reflect reality.”

There’s another, even more glaring reality that “legal age 21” flagrantly ignores: an 18 year old is an adult. In the United States, upon your 18th birthday you are virtually showered with privileges and responsibilities: you can get married, serve on a jury, vote for president and even go to war. But an 18-year-old responsible enough to carry an AK-47 can’t handle drinking a Bud Light? Please.

Not to mention, the law doesn’t work.

“What I think legal age 21 convincingly demonstrates in that you cannot change a culture through legislation,” says McCardell, but he’s not ready to give up on changing culture altogether. Instead, McCardell is working to tweak the young adult drinking culture in America. He’s betting that by allowing 18 year olds to try alcohol in an open environment and teaching them about the pros and cons of drinking in a classroom setting, parents and educators can take away some of the glamour of binge drinking and beer games. In other words, he’s betting we can become more European.

And he’s not alone. When we asked coastalbeat.com readers if they thought the drinking age should be lowered to 18 years old 46% of responders said “yes” while only 37% voted for keeping the law as is. (17% said it didn’t matter or that there should be no minimum drinking age.) In a Boston Globe poll asking a similar question McCardell’s position received even more dramatic support. A whopping 71.4% of voters agreed that the drinking age should be lowered and teens will learn to drink responsibly, while only 28.4% voted against changing the minimum age to 18.

Would lowering the drinking age to 18 really make college students any less likely to chug beers, do keg stands or play flip cup into the wee hours of the morning? No one can say for sure, but with young adults already hitting the sauce hard, underage drinking needs to come out of the closet. It’s been 23 years since Regan closed the book on legal drinking age; today we’re overdue for a new chapter.