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.