Which is probably how it should be. But I think for American parents, that would be a very tough adjustment, to get into the mindset that if their kids are going to have a "wild phase" when it comes to social drinking, then might as well have it be while they're still living in your home. There's a sense that any good, decent parent ought to be far more "in control" of their kids than that. Like, even with the weekend drinking back when I was in highschool in MS that I was describing earlier, my brothers and I might have ONE beer, but we never allowed ourselves to get visibly buzzed, because we knew we'd be in big trouble with our parents if we came home like that. And even though the whole thing was of course completely illegal--the underage drinking, the trespassing, the letting some fellow highschool student who might be pretty toasted drive you home--still, we'd look at the kids who often went home pretty soused from these outings, shake our heads and go, "Man, that's pretty sad that their folks don't even care." So much is about 'What will Mom and Dad think?', and that can pave the way for a kind of juvenile attitude later on (i.e., in your late teens and early 20s) of "Woo hoo! Now I can do whatever the fuck I want, and no one's there to stop me!" Which maybe plays into the drinking and driving thing, too, since that's also reckless behavior.
I don't know about the Netherlands, but at least among traditional-aged college students in the US, what you see a lot are these big weekend parties where the express purpose and whole point is for basically everyone in attendance to get just staggering drunk. I never understood it either, but I don't think that kids who do this actually stop to ask themselves if they in fact consider the physical results of this routine "fun" or not--it's just something you do, a taken-for-granted part of the "college experience." There's something on the order of a kind of machismo about it.