College is supposed to be about getting an education, not becoming a professional activist. Why are so many students wasting their time fighting the oil industry?

Megan McArdle writes at Bloomberg.

College Students Can’t Defeat Big Oil

The idea of divestment from fossil fuels is gaining traction on U.S. college campuses. Last year, student activists famously disrupted a Swarthmore College open meeting where the issue was being discussed, which I filed away under “people with too much time on their hands and an insufficient grounding in enlightenment values.” But according to the Wall Street Journal, the movement is having some effect: Several major endowments, including Stanford’s, have divested from fossil fuels.

I find this sort of riveting. I think the odds of this movement having any impact at all on the consumption of fossil fuels are statistically indistinguishable from zero. So why are endowments giving in, and thereby sacrificing potential returns? Why, for that matter, has this so fixated the students?

In case any student activists are reading this, let me explain. University endowments may seem very large in comparison with your living expenses or income. But in comparison with the overall supply of financial assets in the U.S. economy, the roughly $400 billion they have to invest is not enough to move markets by any substantial amount, especially not in the stock of a massive, widely traded company such as a big oil corporation. For purposes of comparison, the total outstanding value of the stock of U.S. companies was $18 trillion in 2012 and has increased substantially since then. And, of course, many fossil-fuel companies are foreign-owned. And many others are large, state-owned firms that don’t really care what the student body of Swarthmore thinks.

Forcing endowments to divest from fossil-fuel investments may possibly be enough to cost those endowments some significant money, but it is not going to be enough to cause much consternation at the headquarters of Big Oil or Big Natural Gas or Big Coal.