There is no question that American colleges have generally failed to persuade students not to drink, even though most of them have to break the law to do so. But that failure seems like insufficient reason for lowering the drinking age across the land, as many college presidents have recently been advocating.

It may well be that the “forbidden fruit” aspect of alcohol is what encourages more college students to drink to excess today than when the drinking age was 18; and that lowering the drink age might result in less so-called binge-drinking — where the kids drink so much they poison themselves or engage in life-threatening behavior. There’s no real way to tell, of course.

But it seems like a no-brainer that cutting the age to 18 or 19 would create other, more serious problems, mostly related to DWI. College students do most of their drinking on or just-off campus. They’re far less likely to drive after getting drunk than someone who’s gone out to a bar to drink. If it were once again legal for 18-, 19- and 20-year-olds to drink in bars (and other public places), not only would more college students do so, but so would non-college teenagers. There would almost certainly be more drunks on the roads, and the worst kind: those with relatively little driving experience. Traffic fatalities would surely rise.

Another problem that would likely follow: more drinking among high school kids. If the legal age were 18, many high-school seniors would be able to buy, making it easier for freshmen, sophomores and juniors to get hold of the stuff. Making the legal age 19 might solve that problem to some degree but it also might transfer the “forbidden fruit” syndrome to high school students. It would also create a dichotomy among college students, with freshmen as the only legal have-nots.

The problem is less the legal drinking age than the fact that college students, most of them away from home for the first time, like to experiment with alcohol. (They drank plenty when the legal age was 18, too.) Lowering the age to 18 won’t alter that fact of life much, if at all, but it would create a host of other problems off college campuses. The possible benefits just don’t seem worth the risks.