Role of the students and intelligentsia

Hey comrades,

had this topic with someone recently and think it's quite an interesting one so I'd love to hear your takes on this:

Essentially what's the role or what can the role of the intelligencia and students be in the struggle?

Historically they've played quite an important role. Just look at the '68 movement in Germany and the wider student unrests in Europe in the late 60s and 70s. At the time they certainly played a major part in the revolutionary struggle. This reputation of the revolutionary/rebelling student and university as incubators for revolutionary thought and organiszing has lingered to this day, even though it's far from the truth in the west.

Just looking at this sector of society from a materialist POV is quite interesting. Students are in a weird and unique position in society in that they're often one of the most exploited and poor demographics. Today they're mostly in crazy debt, most of them have to work particularily bad jobs to survive university. Universities themselves are increasingly exploiting the labour of students to finance themselves. Jobs after university nowadays often don't guarantee anything above a dead average wage, certainly often earning much less than even traditional trades. At the same time they are naturally among the most educated people in society, still often have much more opportunity to organize and familiarize themselves with revolutionary thought.

Yet, they're undoubtedly in a strange limbo of both priviledge and overexploitation. They tend to be from fairly bourgeois backgrounds and even the more exploited ones often think of themselves not as belonging to the working-class people they often work with, but more of a temporarily embarassed petty-bourgeois. This, nowadays, makes for a strangely poor, miserable, student body that doesn't really have a grand, bright, rich future looming, but is also entirely without class consciousness and often extremely apolitical beyond the current radlib topic of the day. Eg trying to organize students in the peace movement is a fools errand. They don't give flying fuck. 100bn for the army while education is crumbling and shutting down classes to save energy costs? Whatever.

So what to do? Is this demographic just a lost cause for now or are there ways to build class consciousness among them specifically and to organize this important part of the youth?