The Kids These Days TM are making demands on their colleges. They use a lot of hashtags, so it ends up circulating through to the media. From there, we go on to judge the opinions of 18-22 year olds and come up shocked when not all of them seem to be completely well thought out. Like every generation that came before, kids are condemned as hopeless, deluded idiots dead set on destroying society. I’m not here to dispute one way or the other the reasonableness of any of the many demands, or how they should be dealt with, I just want to mention that most kids are too busy doing other stuff to be a part of the alleged downfall of civilization.
Let’s say you have about 100 kids protesting on any given school (probably a pretty generous number), and around 10,000 kids per college (obviously the number varies). That’s 1% of the student population that’s protesting for the erosion of society. The other 99% ? They’re doing regular, boring college stuff. Going to class, skipping class, studying, checking Facebook while they’re supposed to be studying, drinking terrible, awful beer, working 2-3 part time jobs to pay for their insane tuition, and so forth. Most people are just living their life, and will go on to influence society like most of us do, by their work and family over the next several decades. If the collegiate generation is going to augment or destroy society, it’s going to be based on their success or failure in these areas, for the most part.
Should we be concerned about the loud people with bullhorns? Possibly. But we only hear them because they’re loud. It’s sampling bias. You don’t hear from the people who are too busy doing other things to gather in a circle and chant.