Weekends in college towns can be punctuated by late-night frolicking, boisterous arguments, loud obscenities, uninvited flower watering and varieties of littering and minor vandalism.

Nobody likes cleaning up after the parties or dealing with the friction left in their wake.

To avoid that, colleges have opened pubs on campus for safe drinking practices, or operated free campus van services. Students have been corralled for mandatory substance abuse seminars.

Judges have sentenced collegians community service.

Much of this is undertaken out of genuine concern for the well-being of the young adults acting out their rites of passage in our streets and on our lawns — perhaps in hopes that the communities where our own kids were being educated would do the same for them.

However, creative these deterrents are, powerful impulses find ways around them.

Recent testimony revealed that two-thirds of the 7,000 crimes reported each year in State College are alcohol-related. The number of students making alcohol related visits to their medical center at Penn State climbed from 178 in 2004-04 to 586 in 2008-09. Liquor sales receipts in the community have nearly quadrupled in 10 years.

So when the senator from Penn State, Jake Corman of Centre County, proposed new penalties for underage drinking in Pennsylvania, Corman knew his remedies aimed to be both a deterrent and a way to recover expenses.

Corman’s proposals would increase maximum fines for underage drinking and public drunkenness from $300 to $1,000, would elevate repeated offenses to a misdemeanor and would allow university towns to add another $100 fee for alcoholrelated convictions.

College students may be able to cover a $300 fine, but even students attending $50,000-a-yearcolleges may not have a spare $1,100. The magic of the proposed penalty is the probability that it will require more communication with the home office — the student’s parents.

Because students reach the age of majority (no longer minors) before they arrive on campus, universities and colleges tend to communicate about the young adults, with the young adults who are their clients and customers, not the financiallysupportive adults in the background.

If the students do not need to communicate with mom and dad, or if the parents don’t mind paying the extra costs for junior’s inebriation, the escalating cost should help communities keep pace with the clean-up.

Paying a hefty, grown-up price for risky and illegal behavior is also a rite of passage.