As I’ve said before, my personal proposal is that the beer/wine drinking age be lowered to January 1 of the year following the year in which you turn 18. Booze stays at 21. So the legal limit stays outside of high school and outside of first semester of college.
The college hard liquor bans come pretty close to my idea (other than the first semester part). The college, as a practical matter, considers beer and wine as de facto legal for students but not booze.
The colleges and the local police can’t change the official state law. But they can change their enforcement and other policies so that they get to the same place. That’s exactly what I would do if I were a college president or a college town police chief.
FYI, 60 percent of college students ages 18–22 drank alcohol in the past month, and almost 2 out of 3 of them engaged in binge drinking during that same timeframe.
So the success of the 21 age on HS students is accompanied by a failure of that same policy among college students.