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Beloit College Mindset List for the Class of 2019

*The following is excerpted from an online article from Beloit College.

Members of the entering college class of 2019 were mostly born in 1997 and have never licked a postage stamp, have assumed that Wi-Fi is an entitlement, and have no first-hand experience of Princess Diana’s charismatic celebrity.

Each August since 1998, Beloit College has released the Beloit College Mindset List, providing a look at the cultural touchstones that shape the lives of students entering college this fall. For this year’s entering class there has always been Google; Email, informal to previous Millennials, has emerged as “the new formal” for them, while texting and other social media serve as the wild and wooly mode of exchange. Teachers have had to work overtime encouraging them to move beyond the Web and consult sources in books and journals. And Poland has always been a member of NATO, suggesting that Mr. Putin’s heartburn about Western expansion is at least as old as the new college kids are.

"The Class of 2019 will enter college with high technology an increasing factor in how and even what they learn," said Charles Westerberg, Director of the Liberal Arts in Practice Center and Brannon-Ballard Professor of Sociology at Beloit College. "They will encounter difficult discussions about privilege, race, and sexual assault on campus. They may think of the ‘last century’ as the twentieth, not the nineteenth, so they will need ever wider perspectives about the burgeoning mass of information that will be heading their way. And they will need a keen ability to decipher what is the same and what has changed with respect to many of these issues."

The Beloit College Mindset List, which this year is as old as the entering students themselves, is created by Ron Nief, Emeritus Director of Public Affairs; Tom McBride, Emeritus Professor of English; and Charles Westerberg. Additional items on the list as well as commentaries and guides are found here and at www.themindsetlist.com. Regular updates and discussions are on Facebook and Twitter.

For the class of 2019, among those who have never been alive in their lifetimes are Princess Diana, Notorious B.I.G., Jacques Cousteau, and Mother Teresa.

Highlights from this year's mindset list:

1. Hybrid automobiles have always been mass produced.
2. Google has always been there, in its founding words, “to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible.”
4. Email has become the new “formal” communication, while texts and tweets remain enclaves for the casual.
6. Hong Kong has always been under Chinese rule.
7. They have grown up treating Wi-Fi as an entitlement.
8. The NCAA has always had a precise means to determine a national champion in college football.
13. “No means no” has always been morphing, slowly, into “only yes means yes.”
14. Cell phones have become so ubiquitous in class that teachers don’t know which students are using them to take notes and which ones are planning a party.
16. Their parents have gone from encouraging them to use the Internet to begging them to get off it.
17. If you say “around the turn of the century,” they may well ask you, “which one?”
24. When they were born, cell phone usage was so expensive that families only used their large phones, usually in cars, for emergencies.
27. Teachers have always had to insist that term papers employ sources in addition to those found online.
30. Surgeons have always used “super glue” in the operating room.
32. The Lion King has always been on Broadway.
42. Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic have always been members of NATO.
44. TV has always been in such high definition that they could see the pores of actors and the grimaces of quarterbacks.
46. The proud parents recorded their first steps on camcorders, mounted on their shoulders like bazookas.

To view the entire list of 50 items, click here.

Source: Beloit College
https://www.beloit.edu/mindset/

Copyright© 2015 Beloit College

Mindset List is a registered trademark