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 Beloit, Wis. – Born when Ross Perot was warning about a giant sucking sound and Bill Clinton was apologizing for pain in his marriage, members of this fall’s entering college class of 2014 have emerged as a post-email generation for whom the digital world is routine and technology is just too slow. 
 
 Each August since 1998, Beloit College has released the Beloit College Mindset List. It provides a look at the cultural touchstones that shape the lives of students entering college this fall. The creation of Beloit’s Keefer Professor of the Humanities Tom McBride and former Public Affairs Director Ron Nief, it was originally created as a reminder to faculty to be aware of dated references, and quickly became a catalog of the rapidly changing worldview of each new generation. The Mindset List website at www.beloit.edu/mindset, the Mediasite webcast and its Facebook page receive more than 400,000 hits annually. 
 
 The class of 2014 has never found Korean-made cars unusual on the Interstate and five hundred cable channels, of which they will watch a handful, have always been the norm. Since "digital" has always been in the cultural DNA, they've never written in cursive and with cell phones to tell them the time, there is no need for a wrist watch. Dirty Harry (who’s that?) is to them a great Hollywood director. The America they have inherited is one of soaring American trade and budget deficits; Russia has presumably never aimed nukes at the United States and China has always posed an economic threat. 
 
 Nonetheless, they plan to enjoy college. The males among them are likely to be a minority. They will be armed with iPhones and BlackBerries, on which making a phone call will be only one of many, many functions they will perform. They will now be awash with a computerized technology that will not distinguish information and knowledge. So it will be up to their professors to help them. A generation accustomed to instant access will need to acquire the patience of scholarship. They will discover how to research information in books and journals and not just on-line. Their professors, who might be tempted to think that they are hip enough and therefore ready and relevant to teach the new generation, might remember that Kurt Cobain is now on the classic oldies station. The college class of 2014 reminds us, once again, that a generation comes and goes in the blink of our eyes, which are, like the rest of us, getting older and older. 
 
 Most students entering college for the first time this fall—the Class of 2014—were born in 1992. 
 
 For these students, Benny Hill, Sam Kinison, Sam Walton, Bert Parks and Tony Perkins have always been dead. 
 
 1. Few in the class know how to write in cursive. 
 
 2. Email is just too slow, and they seldom if ever use snail mail. 
 
 3. “Go West, Young College Grad” has always implied “and don’t stop until you get to Asia…and learn Chinese along the way.” 
 
 4. Al Gore has always been animated. 
 
 5. Los Angelenos have always been trying to get along. 
 
 6. Buffy has always been meeting her obligations to hunt down Lothos and the other blood-suckers at Hemery High. 
 
 7. “Caramel macchiato” and “venti half-caf vanilla latte” have always been street corner lingo. 
 
 8. With increasing numbers of ramps, Braille signs, and handicapped parking spaces, the world has always been trying harder to accommodate people with disabilities. 
 
 9. Had it remained operational, the villainous computer HAL could be their college classmate this fall, but they have a better chance of running into Miley Cyrus’s folks on Parents’ Weekend. 
 
 10. Entering college this fall in a country where a quarter of young people under 18 have at least one immigrant parent, they aren't afraid of immigration...unless it involves "real" aliens from another planet. 
 
 11. John McEnroe has never played professional tennis. 
 
 12. Clint Eastwood is better known as a sensitive director than as Dirty Harry. 
 
 13. Parents and teachers feared that Beavis and Butt-head might be the voice of a lost generation. 
 
 14. Doctor Kevorkian has never been licensed to practice medicine. 
 
 15. Colorful lapel ribbons have always been worn to indicate support for a cause. 
 
 16. Korean cars have always been a staple on American highways. 
 
 17. Trading Chocolate the Moose for Patti the Platypus helped build their Beanie Baby collection. 
 
 18. Fergie is a pop singer, not a princess. 
 
 19. They never twisted the coiled handset wire aimlessly around their wrists while chatting on the phone. 
 
 20. DNA fingerprinting and maps of the human genome have always existed. 
 
 21. Woody Allen, whose heart has wanted what it wanted, has always been with Soon-Yi Previn. 
 
 22. Cross-burning has always been deemed protected speech. 
 
 23. Leasing has always allowed the folks to upgrade their tastes in cars. 
 
 24. “Cop Killer” by rapper Ice-T has never been available on a recording. 
 
 25. Leno and Letterman have always been trading insults on opposing networks. 
 
 26. Unless they found one in their grandparents’ closet, they have never seen a carousel of Kodachrome slides. 
 
 27. Computers have never lacked a CD-ROM disk drive. 
 
 28. They’ve never recognized that pointing to their wrists was a request for the time of day. 
 
 29. Reggie Jackson has always been enshrined in Cooperstown. 
 
 30. “Viewer Discretion” has always been an available warning on TV shows. 
 
 31. The first home computer they probably touched was an Apple II or Mac II; they are now in a museum. 
 
 32. Czechoslovakia has never existed. 
 
 33. Second-hand smoke has always been an official carcinogen. 
 
 34. “Assisted Living” has always been replacing nursing homes, while Hospice has always offered an alternative to the hospital. 
 
 35. Once they got through security, going to the airport has always resembled going to the mall. 
 
 36. Adhesive strips have always been available in varying skin tones. 
 
 37. Whatever their parents may have thought about the year they were born, Queen Elizabeth declared it an “Annus Horribilis.” 
 
 38. Bud Selig has always been the Commissioner of Major League Baseball. 
 
 39. Pizza jockeys from Domino’s have never killed themselves to get your pizza there in under 30 minutes. 
 
 40. There have always been HIV positive athletes in the Olympics. 
 
 41. American companies have always done business in Vietnam. 
 
 42. Potato has always ended in an “e” in New Jersey per vice presidential edict. 
 
 43. Russians and Americans have always been living together in space. 
 
 44. The dominance of television news by the three networks passed while they were still in their cribs. 
 
 45. They have always had a chance to do community service with local and federal programs to earn money for college. 
 
 46. Nirvana is on the classic oldies station. 
 
 47. Children have always been trying to divorce their parents. 
 
 48. Someone has always gotten married in space. 
 
 49. While they were babbling in strollers, there was already a female Poet Laureate of the United States. 
 
 50. Toothpaste tubes have always stood up on their caps. 
 
 51. Food has always been irradiated. 
 
 52. There have always been women priests in the Anglican Church. 
 
 53. J.R. Ewing has always been dead and gone. Hasn’t he? 
 
 54. The historic bridge at Mostar in Bosnia has always been a copy. 
 
 55. Rock bands have always played at presidential inaugural parties. 
 
 56. They may have assumed that parents’ complaints about Black Monday had to do with punk rockers from L.A., not Wall Street. 
 
 57. A purple dinosaur has always supplanted Barney Google and Barney Fife. 
 
 58. Beethoven has always been a good name for a dog. 
 
 59. By the time their folks might have noticed Coca Cola’s new Tab Clear, it was gone. 
 
 60. Walmart has never sold handguns over the counter in the lower 48. 
 
 61. Presidential appointees have always been required to be more precise about paying their nannies’ withholding tax, or else. 
 
 62. Having hundreds of cable channels but nothing to watch has always been routine. 
 
 63. Their parents’ favorite TV sitcoms have always been showing up as movies. 
 
 64. The U.S, Canada, and Mexico have always agreed to trade freely. 
 
 65. They first met Michelangelo when he was just a computer virus. 
 
 66. Galileo is forgiven and welcome back into the Roman Catholic Church. 
 
 67. Ruth Bader Ginsburg has always sat on the Supreme Court. 
 
 68. They have never worried about a Russian missile strike on the U.S. 
 
 69. It seems the Post Office has always been going broke. 
 
 70. The artist formerly known as Snoop Doggy Dogg has always been rapping. 
 
 71. The nation has never approved of the job Congress is doing. 
 
 72. One way or another, “It’s the economy, stupid” and always has been. 
 
 73. Silicone-gel breast implants have always been regulated. 
 
 74. They've always been able to blast off with the Sci-Fi (SYFY) Channel. 
 
 75. Honda has always been a major competitor on Memorial Day at Indianapolis. 
 
 ||||| News | Leave a comment HOW TO “NINTENDO-FY” THE GEN Z CLASSROOM! by Tom McBride • September 24, 2018 JOURNEY: How to Nintendofy The Gen Z Classr Tom McBride Remarks For the Southern Regional Education Board (10/2018 Whenever older people teach younger people, as happens every day all over the world, there will be a communications gap. One part of this chasm occurs when the older party, the teacher, assumes knowledge that the younger party doesn’t have. It’s an old principle of learning that we gain new knowlede based on what we already know. So in the 1970s, if students knew about the Watergate scandal, teachers could use that knowledge to teach about Shakespeare’s Richard the Third. The analogies shed light on both Richard Nixon and Richard the Third alike. But nowadays students do not Read on » 
 
 News | 1 Comment THE MINDSET LIST: CLASS OF 2022 by Tom McBride • August 20, 2018 EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE TUESDAY, AUGUST 21 Author contacts: Ron Nief (608-770-2625) niefr@beloit.edu Tom McBride (608-312-9508) mcbridet@beloit.edu Charles Westerberg (608-225-8100) westerbc@beloit.edu The New Millennium Belongs to This Year’s Entering College Class of 2022 in The 21st Annual Mindset List Human beings have always been living — not just traveling — in space. The United States has always been in Afghanistan. Same-sex marriage has always been legal somewhere and the once revolutionary “You’ve got mail” is almost forgotten. A lot can change in just 18 years, but these same 18 years also make up the mindset—or “event horizon”—of today’s entering college students. Born in 2000, the first year of the new millennium, these students are members of the College Read on » 
 
 News | Leave a comment FAREWELL TO THE DORMITORY by Tom McBride • April 7, 2018 Farewell to the Dorm MINDSET LIST® Remarks Delivered to the Interface Student Housing Conference, Austin, Texas, April 6, 2018 The Mindset List® thanks Mr. Bruce Sanders of Elauwit for inviting us to speak today. Over half a century ago I began my college life in what was called a dormitory, at a university about ninety miles northwest of Austin. Though we did not appreciate it at the time, we were herded like the proverbial cattle into a four-story building with the same-sized rooms, sparsely furnished with standard issue university desks, tables, and beds. We ate the same food, prepared in advance for us, all in the same place. We had communal bathrooms—none of us even had our own stall, Read on » 
 
 News | Leave a comment THE BELOIT COLLEGE MINDSET LIST: Class of 2021! by Tom McBride • August 21, 2017 Beloit College Releases the Mindset List for This Year’s Entering Class of First-Year College Students, The Class of 2021 Beloit, Wis. —This year’s entering college class of 2021 can’t remember when a “phone” wasn’t a video game and research library. Mostly born in 1999, they’ve always been searching for Pokemon. They’ve never read a Peanuts strip that wasn’t a repeat and they never had the privilege of a Montgomery Ward catalogue as a booster seat. They have persevered in a world without Joe Dimaggio and brightened by emojis. If you ask them about the whine of a dial-up modem, expect a blank stare. These are among the items in this year’s Beloit College Mindset List, the 20th such release since Read on » 
 
 News | Leave a comment THE MINDSET LIST® OF GENERATION X by Tom McBride • May 15, 2017 THE MINDSET LIST® OF GENERATION X Tom McBride Most Gen Xers are now between 37 and 53. Partly because they have been deemed, by demographers, to have had only a sixteen-year run, their numbers are small. But they were also born during a time of low birth rates compared to those of the later 40s and the 1950s. The reasons are many: the Pill, divorce, more women working out of the home, and perhaps access to abortion. One commentator has called Gen Xers America’s neglected middle child. Thanks to the death rate, Millennials have now taken over Boomers as the largest generational cohort. There are about 75 million Millennials and more than ten million fewer Gen Xers. But by 2028 Read on » 
 
 News | Leave a comment THE ECONOMIC VIRTUES OF MILLENNIALS by Tom McBride • September 25, 2016 THE ECONOMIC VIRTUES OF MILLENNIALS Tom McBride (Delivered on September 15 at the De Meo/Schneider Investment Conference in Chicago) Deidre McCloskey is a renowned economic historian at the University of Illinois right here in Chicago. One of her more striking ideas is that the virtues of different social groups are strongly determined by their economic status. For instance, the peasant class, having no prospects for financial gain, glommed onto the virtue of humility, linked to the idea that God would reward them for their humility someday in Heaven. For the aristocratic class, whose financial prosperity was assured, courage became a dominant virtue. They who have everything only lack the military adventure of becoming warriors, on battlefields where their bravery will Read on » 
 
 News | Leave a comment Now on Amazon: THE MILLENNIAL PROMISE–40 Tips from The Mindset List® by Tom McBride • August 8, 2016 Click on the image to your left for the Amazon link to our latest book: THE MILLENNIAL PROMISE: 40 Tips from The Mindset List®. It’s a terrific guide to all phases of Millennial education–from classroom motivation to high tech instruction to the art of giving assignments. Think of it as The Elements of Style for Millennial education! It’s a concise little manual for teachers, counselors, administrators–useful for anyone involved in the education and training of America’s most talked-about generation. 
 
 News | Leave a comment THE MINDSET LIST® SPEAKERS’ PROGRAM by Tom McBride • April 15, 2015 THE MINDSET LIST® SPEAKS! Looking for Great and Time-Tested Public Speakers? Tom McBride and Ron Nief, co-authors of The Beloit College Mindset List® and The Mindset Lists of American History (Wiley, 2011) and The Mindset List of the Obscure (Sourcebooks, 2014) speak frequently about the generation gap around the country and to a wide variety of organizations. We’ve spoken, led workshops and delivered the keynote addresses to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and to the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) national convention, to library associations, museum staff, and to educators at all levels, to state retirement fund administrators and to to educators and specialists dealing with youth and financial literacy, And all this is but a small sample. We work with our Read on » 
 
 News | Leave a comment WE R HISTORY: A Study Guide to THE MINDSET LISTS OF AMERICAN HISTORY by Tom McBride • November 8, 2013 WeRHistory A Guide to THE MINDSET LISTS OF AMERICAN HISTORY INTRODUCTION WeRHistory is a guide to discussion of the past and do-it-yourself history. As co-authors, we want our readers to explore the underlying message of THE MINDSET LISTS OF AMERICAN HISTORY: From Typewriters to Text Messages, What 10 Generations of Americans Think is Normal. As the first chapter says, “History Has Always Been Us.” Each of us does our bit for history every day. We make personal decisions that alter our individual history and collective decisions that make history. We are all part of the historical parade from birth to grave. We are all historical personages and actors in a historical drama. We not only are history; we can Read on »
– US News & World Report is ready to shock us all with its Best Colleges 2011 ranking, which places Harvard smack dab on top. Again. But—news alert!—Princeton has tumbled from tying the venerable Crimson to No. 2. That list, which you can see here, doesn't wow us quite so much as does another annual list released today: Beloit College's Mindset List, which gives us a snapshot of the realities and events shaping the lives of this year's freshman class, born in 1992. Some highlights: The majority don't know how to write in cursive. They have never had trouble understanding what a "caramel macchiato" is. Clint Eastwood is some guy who directs movies. Fergie is a member of the Black Eyed Peas, not the British Royal Family. Czechoslovakia has never existed. The Post Office has always been basically broke. Click here for the complete 75-item list (Buffy and Barney and Beanie Babies, oh my!).