My mother says that Brown University, where I am a senior, is a four-year summer camp, a haven for overgrown babies. After all, we have a teddy bear for a mascot, attend officially sponsored ice cream parties and follow as few academic rules as possible. Meanwhile, we are unconcerned with burning our bras, protesting for peace or “sticking it to the man.” If my parents are right, the observation says more about the times we live in than the peculiarities of Brown.

When my parents went to college, many of their generation were working full-time jobs instead of going to college. The college students of the 1960’s and 1970’s saw themselves as a privileged minority, pursuing an alternative adulthood from which they could critique the mainstream and agitate for change. Their parents saw them as directionless hippies. The debate about college was carried on between college students–as a distinct entity defined by age and cultural values–and the mainstream. Today’s campuses, my parents say, show no signs of this debate.

I thought of my parents when I read Rick Perlstein’s essay on the state of higher education. Why, he asks, did college lose its place as the home of youth counterculture?

One factor is the increasing volume of American college students. While not everyone grows up expecting a degree, a college education is a more integrated part of the mainstream cultural ideal than it was a generation ago. Going to college is no longer an ideological choice to separate from society and think about its problems. If today’s college students no longer see ourselves as a distinct group, the high value our parents placed on educating us is one good explanation.

My mother sees this as a sign of apathy. If we are not banding together AS young people and AS college students, we must not be fighting for anything. And since we’re no longer articulating a heady intellectual counter-culture, the nation is no longer talking about us, or looking to us for the cultural cutting-edge.

Yes, the logic of setting established traditionalism against a youth counterculture has collapsed with our generation. But that does not mean we have lost the will to make change, nor that the nation is no longer being driven by college-aged innovators.

Youth movements from the 1950s to the 1990s were always about group identity – young people against a clearly identified “establishment” of the government and their parents. It was always possible to identify dominant countercultural voices – underground rock groups or populist politicians – as separate from the established culture they sought to critique. Once upon a time, a well-meaning parent could switch on MTV or open Rolling Stone and be reasonably sure to find out what his teenage child was listening to.

Generation Y takes individualism literally. These days, young people don’t turn en masse to any one TV show or blog for news, music or fashion. In the decentralized world of YouTube and MySpace, bands rise to fame through Web downloads and never appear on MTV. We have personalized encounters with culture and politics, setting our homepage preferences to report only on the news that interests us.

It’s difficult, if not impossible, to identify where the mainstream ends and the “underground” begins – that’s just another category undone by absolutist individualism. When there isn’t a clear cultural “establishment,” there’s no need for a counterculture to resist it.

But that doesn’t mean we’re a generation without ideas. Rejecting the hyperbolic radicalism of youth movements past is an ideological choice. Our individualism, grounded in a decentralized encounter with the outside world, feeds into more individualized but no less passionate responses to questions of artistic or political import.

Because our experiences of politics, culture, and identity occur online, Generation Y college students share common experiences, causes and beliefs with college students in China, young people working instead of pursuing higher education, and even with their parents. Age and education–traditional group identities–mean very little today. Instead, a Generation Y college student holds views as an individual.

Because we don’t think of ourselves in collective terms, it’s hard to pick out social change or cultural dialogue being driven by college students as a group. But that does not render the college-age bracket irrelevant to the nation outside the Ivy-covered halls.

The driving force for cultural change in America today is the future of technology. We are the generation driving that future, using and implementing new technologies to reshape the nation. Because we achieve change as individuals, in a decentralized online world, the nation’s leaders interpret the transformation as the “impact of technology” rather than the “impact of Generation Y.” Individualist as we are, we would have it no other way.

It is because Generation Y engages as individuals online, for example, that politicians are learning to use YouTube, Facebook and blogs. It is because Generation Y believes in technology that individual scientists among us will advance cancer research or discover the key to storing solar energy. It is because Mark Zuckerberg was at college that he developed Facebook, the most revolutionary, and society-altering, new business of our era.

Richard Perlstein wonders in his essay, “What’s the Matter with College,” why a college senior aspires to a job in biotechnology. Perhaps, because the student is a member of Generation Y, he would not think to describe his science as a social cause. But in 2007, biotechnology may be a more relevant agent of social change than picket lines.

Indeed, Perlstein himself reminds us that in the “good old days,” college was the driver of a new knowledge economy. This biotech expert and his peers are the knowledge economy at work, so why is Perlstein so disheartened? Perhaps because today’s economy, and today’s social change, center on the realm of science, where Perlstein’s romantic reminiscences of dissident literary circles suggest that politics and philosophy are somehow superior forms of knowledge.

Literature and history major though I am, I believe cultural and political fields will take their cues from technology and science in the years to come. As the institution where these new technologies are being developed, colleges could not be more essential to the future of the nation. Every congressional bill about funding medical research is recognition of the crucial role academic institutions will play in the high-tech future. Every intellectual property law designed to organize the blogosphere is an acknowledgement that blogs are the new newspapers. Investing in colleges pioneering research into new medical technologies or new media is as much an engagement with a social institution as Reagan’s comments about Berkeley were in 1966.

The debate in America today is not a debate about campus riots, but our frequent conversations about technology–stem cell research, green energy or illegal downloads–are also tacitly about the campuses where technology thrives. Simply by replacing the debate about college with a debate about technology, we have restructured the national conversation on our terms.

Richard Perlstein, David Brooks, and my mother believe the years of revolutionary youth are past. But I wonder if, since the idea of radical youth is no longer revolutionary, our rejection of such countercultural labels is its own brand of nonconformity.