Where TF do I begin to unpack the "coddling" that today's 18-year-olds experience?

Let me start with tuition. Yale tuition/room/board in 1976, when the author of this op-ed graduated, was under $7k. It's 10x that now. https://twitter.com/WSJopinion/status/1288563154004447232

Housing, and health care costs have also skyrocketed since AEI Senior Fellow Gelerntner got his degree and started his career, but wages haven't. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/what-to-do-with-the-senator-this-summer-put-him-to_b_5980ab0ce4b0cb4fc1c73c7d

Today's coddled 18-year-old will likely attend college virtually in the fall, or be unemployed, because today's coddled 65-year-olds voted for a president whose disastrous response to the pandemic has us far behind every other country in safely reopening.

Today's coddled 18-year-old has lived the trauma of lock-down drills because this country's old white people insist on making us an extreme outlier in gun ownership and, by consequence, gun deaths.

Today's coddled 18-year-old is more likely to be non-white, to live in a large metro area or urban area, to be religiously unaffiliated, to take public transit, to want a robust social safety net, to be suspicious of corporate power.

Today's coddled 18-year-olds are younger than the global war on terror, have spent weeks or months taking standardized tests (used to) attend school in decaying buildings with teachers who have to crowdsource crayons and Kleenex.

It will be mathematically impossible for many of today's coddled 18-year-olds to afford education, housing, and children. Many are rightly concerned that they would be bringing kids into an uninhabitable planet.

Today's coddled 18-year-olds have no use for Donald Trump, the GOP, or supply-side economics. So it's really no surprise when the WSJ op-ed page prints the outrageous claim that these people should be stripped of the franchise.

Very soon, we'll be treated to more hand-wringing about how young people- particularly on campuses like the one that employs Gelernter, are "illiberal." They shout down opposing ideas, you see. Oh my stars!

Meanwhile only one side is trying to dismantle democracy.//