(More) Party time in school? Relative age and alcohol consumption

ABSTRACT

School starting age policies result in academic cohorts where the oldest students are approximately a full year older than their youngest peers. A student’s relative age in their cohort has been shown related to many important outcomes. As examples, relatively older students have been found to be more focused and successful academically, more consistent in their related goals, have more friends, and are less likely to commit crime. Here, we examine the relationships between relative age and alcohol consumption (and partying behaviours) during high school and college. The sample used consists of more than 87,000 U.S. students who attended over 600 different colleges and universities, and even more high schools. These outcomes are found to be only mildly related to relative age, with evidence pointing towards older students drinking and partying slightly less during both high school and college. Though they had upwards of an extra year of being older than the legal drinking age during college, relatively older students drank slightly less, on average. Thus, among college students, the maturity effect of relative age appears stronger than the legal deterrence effect of minimum legal drinking age laws. (I23, I29, I12)

KEYWORDS:

• Age effects
• relative age
• school cut-off date
• alcohol
• higher education
• undergraduate

Acknowledgments

Special thanks go to Elizabeth Dhuey, Laura Crispin, and participants at the 2019 meetings of the International Atlantic Economic Society and the Southern Economic Association for helpful comments and suggestions. Any remaining errors are, of course, our own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ See, e.g. Lenard and Penã (2018) for a discussion of redshirting and its relationship with ethnicity, and Huang (2015) for a discussion of its overall prevalence.

² Summary statistics for both the outcome and control variables are presented in Appendix Table A1.

³ For a listing of state cut-off laws during our sample period, we direct the reader to Appendix Table A1 of Bedard and Dhuey (2012).

⁴ For the interested reader, we provide results from further sub-sampling in Appendix Tables A2–A5. In those results, the impacts of relative age appear more prominent among students from higher socioeconomic backgrounds, the female high school effects more prominent for minorities, and the female college effects more prominent among white students.