Recently, I wrote about the ways that high schools are diminishing success in the name of fairness. This time, let’s look at what happens when these kids get to college.

College is a huge investment in both time and money, and one that is, in theory, supposed to more than pay for itself with greater opportunities and marketable skills. Unfortunately, it has become increasingly clear that our current batch of graduates, and the undergraduates coming up behind them, have been too swaddled to gain many of the skills that would translate to success in real-word situations. Graduates, especially from the loftiest echelons of higher learning, are churning out students with one overriding skill: self-identifying as victims. Once so formed, these students insist the world around them change to accommodate this perception.

“Victim” is defined as “a person who has been attacked, injured, robbed or killed by someone else / a person who is cheated or fooled by someone else / someone or something that is harmed by an unpleasant event (such as an illness or accident).” But on elite college campuses across the nation, students consider themselves victimized by anything that makes them uncomfortable, such as a differing opinion. What’s worse is that they are having this departure from reality validated by their schools.

You may already have read here at The Stream about the students at Oberlin retreating to so-called “safe spaces” to avoid hearing differing opinions. What does a Safe Space entail? At Brown, they are known to include, according to the New York Times, “cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies, as well as students and staff members trained to deal with trauma.” You read that correctly. One of the most elite colleges in the country is providing Play-Doh to help students recover from hearing a differing viewpoint, something that should be all in a day’s work of a college student.

This is hardly an anomaly. When Northwestern University’s Laura Kipnis published an essay entitled “Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe,” questioning why universities should be required to silence dissent, a Title IX complaint was filed against her. At Harvard, a law professor revealed that she is regularly asked not to teach on the subject of rape, as it may upset some students. A band was disinvited from an event at Hampshire College because there were too many white people in it. Apparently, it was cultural appropriation. These are only a few particularly egregious examples of many.

Many of the students coming of age in this cocoon are terrified of differing opinions to the extent that they claim to find them harmful or violent. Rather than using the inevitable clash of opposing views as “teachable moments,” colleges simply do away with open discussion and shield students from viewpoints they don’t already accept. Critical thinking? Who needs it?

The left-leaning Slate posits that the problem is in the way college students are treated: as adults. They argue that “Students today are more like children than adults and need protection.”

Yes, they are like children, but they are like children because they have been indulged as such. College is time to grow up. By the end of college, a person has invested tens or hundreds of thousands of (usually borrowed) dollars towards his or her future.

Fortunately, some are speaking out against what The Washington Post calls “the swaddled generation.” For example, Thomas Sowell has argued, correctly, that “micro-aggressions” are a tool of “micro-totalitarianism.” Vox recently ran a piece, written under a pseudonym, entitled “I’m a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me.” The writer details the way in which the feelings police make it impossible to teach, because teachers and schools can be attacked and ruined by one open-minded discussion.

How are these students who groomed in such an environment supposed to function in society after graduation? How are they to function in the workplace? The truth of the matter is that they probably won’t. Not well. Not in a healthy way. Having been catered to, these students will simply claim injury every time they are confronted with reality. We can only hope that reasonable heads will prevail before it is too late.