[kernoble]

The universities seem to have forgotten that there role is to teach and educate, not overreach into their student's lives. College is about learning to cope and manage on your own, as well as learn. Having a different helicopter parent at the university (compared to home) won't help that development.

[hemloc_io]

While it is tempting to blame universities entirely for this, and I can go on all day about it, students culture has changed a lot too.

I'm not sure what has caused it.

[MikeTheRocker]

Can you elaborate on this? How do you think culture has changed?

[lotsofpulp]

One factor might be the ubiquity of recording devices. It seems reasonable that people behave differently if they think their spontaneity might expose them to liability down the road due to a recording of it.

[TedDoesntTalk]

There’s also something about dating. The kids I know in college right now have no interest in dating or love or romantic involvement.

I don’t know how that applies here, but it’s a big change from when I was in college.

[insightcheck]

It varies by social group. Most humanities students I knew were interested in dating, whereas most engineering students I knew were more focused on studying and graduating. But anecdotally, every computer science student I knew was in a relationship, and also every math major I knew. The most technically and academically-accomplished people I knew who were the presidents of design teams were also in relationships. This was in a top-30 university in North America.

So, in my personal experience, I found dating to still be big in university. I think this is rational, as I anticipate it to be harder to find a long-term relationship through online dating in one's early-to-mid twenties, versus dating people knwon in-person.

However, for students anxious about economic opportunities (e.g. due to COVID), I do see the appeal to focus on studies and work experience at the expense of dating.

[the_only_law]

A little past college age now, but even people I know in their late 20s have given up on dating and such. I won't pretend to know all the reasons, but I find it funny how much every one I know hates dating apps for good reasons, but always comes back to them.

[insightcheck]

> "A little past college age now, but even people I know in their late 20s have given up on dating and such."

A major reason is that romantic relationship experience compounds, and so it's difficult to start with relationships later in life. For many people, it's much harder to start a first romantic relationship, than it is to develop subsequent ones. Multiple rejections early on, especially when other people seem to find relationships easy, can lead to reduced self-esteem ("Am I creepy? What is wrong with me?" etc.). It can lead to habits such as having a huge fear of rejection and flirting through physical touch, which leads to a lack of confidence reinforced by further rejection, which further erodes romantic confidence in a negative feedback loop.

Low-quality romantic advice on the internet, such as on Reddit, worsens the problem. Anecdotally, I've found the common, highly-upvoted advice of telling a person "I like you" before you're dating to never once work in my personal experience, while leaning in and pausing while paying attention to social cues to kiss on a date actually led to relationships.

My advice to any guys in their 20s trying to date would be:

1) ignore most internet advice on dating (maybe not this comment, but absolutely avoid incel communities and 4chan),

2) consider an experienced psychotherapist for anxiety if you have rejection anxiety, and

3) try to observe a male friend who is good at relationships who is a moral person, and see what he does (e.g. jokes in a flirty way, and notice how he flirts with touch); if you don't know a friend like this, try to make one (e.g. through a social activity like rock climbing or martial arts).

[insightcheck]

An essay that thoroughly explores this is called "The Coddling of the American Mind," which was published in The Atlantic in 2015 [1]. The essay presents an argument against the aversion of covering certain points of views in a university course, with the rationale that it might cause emotional harm against students. Another article that shows how student tolerance of opposing views in the US has changed over time was published in Vox [2.]

However, for a diversity of views, a strong counter-argument to the above narrative was published in Times Higher Education [3], which argues that it's quite feasible to teach courses with controversial material, and educators should not be afraid of their students.

These articles include evidence that university student culture has indeed changed, with reports of certain groups of university students being more outspoken about the coverage of certain controversial material in courses. There are arguments for and against about whether or not this change is good for the development of university students as people, but there has certainly been a change in university student culture.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-cod...

[2] https://www.vox.com/2015/6/3/8706323/college-professor-afrai...

[3] https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2015/06/09/essay-reject...

[hemloc_io]

So someone else gave you a well thought out, and sourced answer.

I'll just give you my personal thoughts on the issue, which are incomplete. I try to separate out what is actually going on from generic, "kids these days" bullshit that you hear a lot in the media, and by lots of older people. These are themes in people's lives when I was in school a couple years ago and even today, but they're not the whole story. Lots of good stuff is happening on campuses too, LGBTQ stuff being the best! It's not a big deal to be whatever you'd like.

There's plenty of young people having plenty of fun, so I don't want to paint some kind of completely bleak picture, but here are some of the problems that have degraded peoples ability to be fun.

The things I thing contribute the most are: - Phone cameras and the ubiquity of recording stuff - The ability for people to find those recordings if anything goes wrong in your life forever. - Lack of economic prosperity, and the feeling it's getting worse. So you can't rock the boat.

-Majority of kids in college now were kids when the GFC happened, everyone I know has graduated into a recession of some kind, or knows someone who has.

- Increasing policitcal polarization + extreamism. Everything has sacred tenats. If you're caught violating them you risk getting kicked out of your, economically advantaged, cohort. A small but loud minority who enjoy the political power of "catching" people out. This is true basically anywhere, left or right. This doesn't factor into your day to day, but does have a cooling effect on actual political discussion.

- Rising costs of basically everything that matters. Housing costs are impossible to manage for students and recent grads, the expectation is you will not own a house, and that your quality of life will be worse than your parents. Lots of people move back in with their parents for a couple years post college, assuming they like their family. Inflation, has and will make this worse.

- Extreme annoyance, and sometimes straight up rage about the fact that older people do not understand that things are systemically wrong right now. Mainly this is also related to housing. There is a sterotype of the entitled older white woman, "Karen", that everyone tries to avoid being associated with. Everyone I know has been abused at some service job by them, or in dealing with them for something related to their situation.

- Huge student loan bills on degrees that aren't going to pay for them. In lots of ways this isn't even the students fault, since colleges treat them like cash cows for everything. It's very possible to end up 200-300k in debt, which even a high paying degree will not cover reasonably. People are busy and do not have to time to fight the bureaucratic machine, especially when they will probably lose.

- COVID made everything above much worse. Destroyed basically all of young people's social lives, and empowered the people who were already busy trying to monitor and control people. Most of the people I know developed mental illness of some kind during that time.

There was an incident at my school, where students off campus had a small BBQ and someone jumped the fence to record them and post publicly calling them "plauge rats" and asking the school to suspend them. This wasn't really met with much pushback from the student body, but the admin didn't do anything about it so kind of a wash.

- People I know who didn't go to college generally fall into two camps. Both are mostly male. One camp is in jail, the other camp just stays at home with their parents and plays video games. I suspect it's just my locality thing, but a lot of people's younger male sibilings either dropped out of college, or never went and spend lots of time on twitch + discord etc. Very few if anyone I've met knows people in a trade school, even though I have older family who have worked in the trades.

- For lots of people performativity is reality.[0] Either because they do not have the means to go out and party, or the social media clout is more important. This seems to effect women more than men in my experiance. Lots of places to drink have capitalized on this by adding things like ball pits. Most of these places have huge lines. For me this always seemed pretty anti social.

Lots of people want to be influencers, probably the same people that wanted to be actors in previous eras.

Performativity extends to politics since the bar is so low for expressing support for idea X or Y. Lots of people feel like they're doing something when they post a political message, which might be true considering how much time people spend in them. The youth political movements are completely ineffective at all levels in my experiance. They're handily beaten by geriatrics nationally, look at the presidents these last like 8 years, and locally, look at the handful of NIMBYs who have destroyed Bay Area housing for that. I think it's generally harder to commit crimes, and easier to be a criminal than it was before which influences the type of protests you can have.

Lots of people also aren't willing to risk their lives for politics when things are so precarious economically and socially particularly when nothing is expected to change.

- Wealth inequality has lead to rich kids pretending to be poor or underprivileged at record numbers, always been a problem in punk (To the point where it's a meme.) but you see it on campus as well. It adds to the performativity problem above. There are lots of rich kids who say things like capitalism is broken.

- There is an undercurrent of people who explicitly subscribe to Malthusian/Hobbesian ideologies, and they seem to be dominant right now. Generally these break down to "there's only so many resources to go around so we much divide them according to X thing.". Lots of people believe the topline solutions and tenents generally even if they can't articulate where it comes from. This isn't a left vs right thing, both have different, insidious imo, strains of this ideology.

- People in charge have the same ideology as the students. I think this is a big change for a lot of professors who are used to having to fight a right wing admin. (The biggest factor in who you vote for is your college degree.). I think it also incentives following what the admin says, b/c you're on the same "team". There is an expectation of capitulation of the admin to the most vulnerable and "vulnerable" students. The admin also viciously deals with people not in these camps. This is expected by everyone, and if the admin were to respond to everyone equally that would be a shock.

This isn't always a negative! If you actually need help, disability etc, the admin will usually help you. It is a double edged sword since students expect the admin to take care of them in lots of ways.

- Discussion around sexual assault/consent are constant and pervasive. Shared responsibility if you see it happening or potentially happening is expected. It's never considered one persons fault, especially in student orgs. This also is double edged sword imo. It seems like it's had a cooling effect on some peoples sex lives and sexual freedom in general, but sexual assault reporting has become much easier and more expected if something happens. I doubt you could have a co-ed shower room now, or a nudist house etc.

EDIT: I think campus "free speech" issues are a red herring mostly capitalized on by a multitude of grifters, both professors and political pundits. Things are a lot more nuanced than that on campuses.

0 - Bo burnham actually has a lot of great insights into this! I'll submit some links to HN.