I may have missed it, but in catching up with this thread, I didn't see any reference to the explosive spread of affordable post-secondary education in the 60s and 70s, which to my mind provided the material underpinnings of the so-called youth revolt of that period. For those like myself who belonged to the first generation which no longer had to leave school to join the workforce to help support the family, the sense of "freedom" was palpable, and the more euphoric among us celebrated it in pointed contrast to the "regimentation", "bureaucratization", and "conformity" we found everywhere else around us. University afforded an extension of adolescence into young adulthood, and communal living arrangements gave rise to allied notions of "solidarity" and further underlined the attraction of "freedom" from parental and workplace authority. The job market was expanding in all fields for university graduates so, unlike today, we could cultivate our interests in the humanties and social sciences without concern for our future job security.
It's important to note that most people did not enjoy this freedom, however - including many of the friends I was leaving behind in my old neighborhood who dropped out or went straight from high school into the same kind of stultifying factory or retail jobs that our parents held. Like prior generations, they married young and embraced conventional values, and were as apt as our elders to mock and resent rebellious university students as spoiled kids with too much time on their hands and too little responsibility. In the case of some of my peers, this was not an entirely unfair judgement.
These were especially exciting times for those of us who lived them on the far left and felt that history was moving in our direction in the wake of successful armed struggles led by kindred Marxists in Cuba, Vietnam, and elsewhere, and who watched and joined with the growing numbers of insurgent blacks, antiwar students, feminists, gays and others taking to the streets at home. It's not at all surprising that there are proprotionately far fewer men and women students active on the left today; anti-imperialist struggles abroad are mainly led by socially reactionary Islamists, and domestic protest is sparse and infrequent. Not to mention that there are far fewer jobs available to steer those interested into the social sciences and humanities, the customary incubators of student political action.
I think there's a tendency to romaticize the 60's rebelllions, however. At the risk of being accused of some romanticism of my own, I recall being more impressed even then by the prewar left which originated and was based in the working class than by the new one which had emerged on the campuses. You could still meet these veterans in the antiwar movement and the unions. The working class Marxists who gravitated to the Communist and other left-wing parties struck me as having more intellectual depth, discipline, and elan than most student radicals, which I think stemmed from having to function in a far more challenging and difficult environment. They were required to fight repressive laws and repressive employers at home, and the most courageous and committed of them volunteered to fight fascism in Spain. On the other hand, our challenge to authority, such as it was, took place within a relatively safe framework of democratic rights won by the preceding generations. There was the exceptional case of Kent State, but it was really only blacks and gays who ran any real risk when they protested. And, of course, our involvements rarely had long term consequences. The end of radical political activity for most students coincided with their graduation from university or soon afterwards, and their record did not typically follow them from job to job as in the case of their working class forerunners who confronted the blacklist.