I think there's a lot going on on campuses at the moment—it's mostly just not getting the media attention it might be. A couple of thoughts on why...
First, a lot of youth activism right now is happening as part of non–age specific, off-campus organizing. DSA, police violence stuff, mass marches, immigration organizing—youth are huge in all that stuff, but it's not exclusively "youth" organizing.
Second, there's so much organizing in the air at the moment (and so much political news, generally) that campus stuff has a hard time breaking through. Eight years ago, an admin building occupation would make a big splash. Today? Much less so.
University of Michigan occupation, April: pressandguide.com/news/faculty-s…
UW Stevens Point occupation, March: stevenspointjournal.com/story/news/edu…
Illinois, March: chicagotribune.com/news/ct-met-un…
The Howard occupation got a lot of press, and the NYU occupation got a little, but most others got nothing nationally. And there were a bunch—far more than eight or ten years ago.
One common thread among the above occupations, too: They were about local issues. If students were taking over admin buildings against Trump, that'd get more press. But taking over admin buildings against Trump doesn't make much sense.
(I also have a strong sense, by the way, that there's a tremendous amount of youth engagement around Democratic electoral politics right now. But again, not coded as "youth," not easy to write a story about.)
An example: If you just flip a single switch in your head and code all DSA media coverage as being coverage of student and youth mobilization—which it is, to a siginificant though not exclusive degree—the picture changes a lot.
Again, this isn't to say that we should understand DSA as exclusively a youth movement, just that a lot of the youth-heavy (and even youth-led) organizing that's happening right now is multigenerational.
