Every August our fondest hope is that the latest Beloit Mindset List will be met with widespread scorn and disgust. And every August we are disappointed. However, the list is often met with selective scorn and disgust. 2010, when the Class of 2014 list was released, was a banner year for anti-Mindlist essays.

At NPR Linda Holmes asked, “Do College Students Really Think Beethoven Is A Dog?”

There’s nothing wrong with startling adults with how terribly old they are; it makes for a lovely little joke between 40-year-olds: “Wait, that movie came out that long ago?…”

But the fact that we feel old is not the responsibility of the class of 2014. Our sense of displacement when we realize how many years have passed since the last time we checked on something — how old Scott Baio got while we were off getting jobs and having families and voting for a series of presidents — isn’t their burden to bear, and assuming that they have ignored everything that happened before they were born is an awfully blunt way to measure “mindset.”…

This list isn’t about the mindset of the class of 2014. It’s about the mindset of the people who write it. It’s about what makes them feel ancient. It’s not about how college students think at 18; it’s about how we think at 40 and 50 and 60. It’s about how we think about the markers we once drove into the ground to mark what we considered Now, and how alarming it is to note that they are farther away than they used to be.

Interestingly, Holmes’ column takes particular aim at #58—”Beethoven has always been a dog”—but (as someone in the comments pointed out) the item was subsequently changed to read “Beethoven has always been a good name for a dog.” We can only hope that our item-by-item examination of every Mindset List can produce the kind of change that Holmes did.

Seth Saith posited that the “Latest ‘Mindset List’ Seems Terribly Out of Touch.”

Instead of “College Mindset,” I think the terrible 2010 list should simply be titled “Some things that happened in 1992.”…

Rather than simply an amalgamation of things that didn’t exist before one’s birth year, I tend to think “mindset”–whether individual or collective–is primarily culled from things that occur after we develop an awareness of the world around us. Though I have no kids, I’m apt to believe that most 18-year-olds don’t acutely remember or have much affinity for the way things were before Y2K, plus or minus a year or two in regards to certain things.

In his essay, “The Beloit College ‘Mindset’ List,” Kenneth Green proposes a “Reverse Mindset List” written by students.

Could I pass a version of the Mindset List, developed by college freshmen and focused on what they know and have experienced? That list would be laden with individuals, events, and references that are contextually important to undergraduates.

There is a good chance that that I would be clueless about many of the items on the “Reverse Mindset” List. What about you?

Finally, Beloit alumnus Adam Reger reveals his deep embarrassment with the list in “The Doleful Sigh of the Beloit College Mindset List.”

If current students are anything like my contemporaries, I can say that Beloit College students are probably rolling their eyes at this dumb thing. It’s condescending, even insulting… Worse, it does the opposite of what the Beloit student spends his/her time learning and striving for: it makes a teeming mass of individuals, bright and focused young people with well-developed skills and articulated goals, into a monolith; one, moreover, mostly notable for what they don’t know.…

[T]he sheer dumbness makes me want to shield my eyes. From the trying-too-hard (“Potato has always ended in an ‘e’ in New Jersey per vice presidential edict”) to the head-scratching-but-also-irrelevant (“While they were babbling in strollers, there was already a female Poet Laureate of the United States”), the Mindset List is dependably embarrassing.

Amen.