But here's the thing: They haven't been decreasing anywhere near as dramatically as the rates for people of the same age group who aren't in college. In other words, young people are drinking less, and college students are drinking relatively more.

The Shape of American Asceticism

Let's take a look, first, at the number of college-aged individuals who say they've had a sip of alcohol in the past month.

Second, here's a different measure of alcohol use, looking at binge drinking:

If you saw just the "full-time college students" trend lines from those two graphs on their own, you might think that, just as British students are (allegedly) responding to a quick, dramatic jump in tuition with a quick, dramatic drop in drinking, American students are responding to rising tuition by gradually scaling back their alcohol intake.

But when you look at the lines for non-student college-age young adults, that story doesn't look so convincing. If anything, it looks like American college drinking has held remarkably steady in the face of a secular trend away from alcohol consumption. Even teetotalers, according to Monitoring the Future numbers, have become more common in the young adult population. (Though the change is most pronounced among high schoolers. Somewhere my 10th grade health teacher is feeling very satisfied.)

Of course, it's possible that recent economic instability has cut into partying. Here, let's zoom in on the past ten years, with to a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services chart from the 2011 National Survey on Drug Use and Health:

The FT piece on UK students suggests that students are staying sober in the library stacks because they're nervous about the economy. Looking at these figures, one could tell the same story about American students: Around 2007-2008, the financial crisis is making headlines every day, and they start worrying about being able to find a job come graduation.

The Sociology of Binge-Drinking

But the best case for a link between economic factors and young adult alcohol consumption has nothing to do with seniors worrying about jobs or sophomores worrying about tuition. Instead, it has to do with the gap between the young adults who go to college and those who don't.

Monitoring the Future has found that as of high school, "college-bound 12th graders are consistently less likely than their non-college-bound counterparts to report occasions of heavy drinking." But that all changes when they go to college, where they "catch up to and pass their peers in binge drinking." Why is that?

Well, to point out the obvious, binge drinking is a bit easier on a student schedule than on a working schedule, meaning that college students may favor partying on weekends over moderate daily drinking. In fact, the only area in which non-students out-drink students, the study authors point out, is in daily drinking (although that accounts for a pretty small portion of respondents in both groups). That has been true since 1980.