Young people in Chile have seen a sharp increase in their participation and their chances of involvement in the social roles shaped during the postwar period of expansion. The rapid urbanization, the great expansion of education systems, the extension of the political rights of citizenship, and the growing absorption of skilled and unskilled manpower by the modern production and services sectors were some of the factors which mobilized young people and turned them into some of the most committed agents of development and modernization; since development and modernization were also the axes of consensus among almost all the social and political protagonists, youth became, almost inadvertently, one of the central agents in the system. One of the most graphic instances of this was the remarkable political and cultural influence exercised by the student movements towards the end of the 1960s.