This year’s entering college class was born with the universal serial bus and they’ve always been connected. They may have had PlayStations in their cribs and their first solid food may have been stuffed crust pizza, but they’ve never visited the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building.
Each August since 1998, Beloit College has released the Beloit College Mindset List and (barring an act of God) will release another one Tuesday morning. We don’t know for sure what items it will contain but we’ve attempted to simulate its results by using similar methods for generating our own Beloit Mindlessness List.
Our list was compiled by a couple of guys without any assistance from or contact with anyone from the Class of 2017. Although we didn’t use microfiche, we did pay special attention to things that happened 18ish years ago since each cohort’s mindset is shaped by stuff that happened around when they were born. We also relied on lazy stereotypes and trivia of interest to us. We didn’t spend much time putting this together and we didn’t check it for accuracy or comprehensibility.
Even if the Class of 2017 Mindset List isn’t identical to ours, they are equally valid, accurate and useful. So feel free to mix and match items as you choose.
The Beloit Mindlessness List for the Class of 2017
For this generation of entering college students, born in 1995, Howard Cosell, Jerry Garcia, Mickey Mantle, Dean Martin, and Ginger Rogers have always been dead.
1. They should keep their eyes open for Olympians Missy Franklin and McKayla Maroney and reality show star Kendall Jenner at freshman orientation.
2. They have never been dependent on MS-DOS as a standalone operating system.
3. Computers have always been checkmating human grand masters.
4. They have always had the option of eating a stuffed crust pizza.
5. Their grandparents had the Bible, Shakespeare, Homer and other great works of Western Civilization. They have wikis.
6. A “tablet” has never been just a slab of stone for making inscriptions.
7. Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg’s avant-garde filmmaking movement is named after the year of their birth.
8. Plasma is no longer just a pale liquid component of blood.
9. This “Multitasking Generation” likes to eat its stuffed pizza while reading wikis on their tablets and watching Dogme 95 films on their plasma televisions.
10. A crawl is no longer just a way for babies to move forward on their hands and knees.
11. They have always known Gabe Kaplan as a professional poker player and not as wisecracking Brooklyn teacher Mr. Kotter.
12. Pedophiles have always lured them with compliments in chat rooms rather than with candy from the window of an unmarked van.
13. Dayton, Ohio, has always been known for the Bosnia-Herzegovina peace treaty rather than as the home of Paul Laurence Dunbar and the Wright Brothers.
14. On the day they were born, their parents may have been listening to Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill. Isn’t that ironic?
15. There has never been a Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
16. A troll no longer lives under a bridge.
17. Java is a computer language, not an Indonesian island, early example of Homo erectus, or slang term for coffee.
18. The Child Protection and Obscenity Enforcement Act has always been delaying their porn careers until age 18.
19. “Oprah, Uma. Uma, Oprah”? Their idea of a bad Oscar host is James Franco.
20.There has always been football in Charlotte, but never in Los Angeles.
21. Yahoo has always been a web portal, not an imaginary race of brutish creatures in Gulliver’s Travels.
22. Nazis have always been unreasonably strict soup makers, not invaders of Poland.
23. When kidnapped by estranged parents they have always been able to come home via the Amber Alert System.
24. Doogie and Michele Houser could be their parents.
25. Woody has always been a pullstring cowboy doll, not an assistant bartender.
26. The Unabomber has always been a published writer.
27. Gedhun Choekyi Nyima has always been the Panchen Lama. Who is Lobsang Trinley Lhündrub Chökyi Gyaltsen?
28. They’ve always been getting connected with USB.
29. Good-bye, NES! Hello, PlayStation!
30. They don’t want to be Left Behind, but they don’t mind reading about it.
31. Betty Rubble has always been a vitamin.
32. Barack Obama has always been getting dreams from his father.
33. Talk show guests have always been murdering each other over confessions of same-sex attraction.
34. Craig is a guy who sells stuff on the Internet, not the star of Poltergeist and Coach.
35. Lockheed has always worked with Martin, but Rowan has never worked with Martin.
36. Their mothers may have gone into labor while drinking Jolt Cola.
37. Mary Richards and Rhoda Morgenstern have always lived in New York City and never in Minneapolis.
38. Independence Day has always been about escaping Alien rule rather than British monarchy.
39. Semi-literate cattle have always been telling them to “Eat Mor Chikin!”
40. Lisa Simpson has always been a vegetarian.
41. Calvin Klein has always been in the faux child porn business.
42. Bee Keeping, Masonry and Consumer Buying have never been Boy Scout merit badges.
43. Like students in the classes of 2002-2016, members of the class of 2017 are ignorant about Johnny Carson, Walter Cronkite and Who Shot J.R. (it was Kristin, his sister-in-law and mistress.)
– Aug. 19, 2013
