There are some different views on this, so what I'm saying here is not factual per se but more or less my personal opinion. History as I see it does not work in a formulaic way with X's and pre-determined reactions, and IMHO does not repeat itself, simply because every era is unique in it's own way and exact repetition is therefore impossible.

Ofcourse there are always similarities, but to name these as a repitition of history would not at all do justice to the complexity of the human world. The recognition of these similiarities is often shaped by the way history has been carried down through the generations. A small example is war-scared discourse about Putin. How many times have I not heard older family members say that he's "just like Hitler" and "we should stop him now before it's too late!". This parallel they're drawing is influenced by two concepts from the accepted narrative the Second World War: that Hitler could've been easily stopped if it weren't for the pre-1939 appeasement politics of Neville Chamberlain and such, and that WWII was one for our fundamental 'Western freedom'. Now Putin is in the media often presented as a new dictator, a new threat to 'Western freedom' and therefore people actively compare him with Hitler, that archetype of a threathening dictator. The many differences between the two situations are barely discussed by those who draw the parallel, and the few similarities actively propagated. Recurring features or trends in human societiesy, of which there are indeed many, should not be seen as one-on-one repitition.

It's always easy to draw parallels between different eras, as it's very human to compare your current situation with a past one from your life (i.e. your current job vs. your job before that, the town you grew up in vs. the town you live now). This is done just as well in 'public conciousness' as in personal life. For example, when the 2008 banking crisis hit, comparisons with the the Great Depression of the 1930's were rampant. Was history repeating itself? Ofcourse not, but because a large financial crisis rocked the world, the memory of past ones were triggered and comparisons were made.

And IMHO, history students do not have a better chance of predicting the future than any other trained academic, which is, a very very small chance. We're busy enough finding out what happened in the past, and that's hard enough as it is.