Lenin’s name has never been on a major city in Russia. (Class of 2012, #38)

Muscovites have always been able to buy Big Macs. (Class of 2012, #52)

The Royal New Zealand Navy has never been permitted a daily ration of rum. (Class of 2012, #53)

Margaret Thatcher has always been a former prime minister. (Class of 2013, #5)

The KGB has never officially existed. (Class of 2013, #13)

The European Union has always existed. (Class 2013, #23)

McDonald’s has always been serving Happy Meals in China. (Class of 2013, #24)

Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Armenia, Latvia, Georgia, Lithuania, and Estonia have always been independent nations. (Class of 2013, #38)

Disney’s Fantasia has always been available on video, and It’s a Wonderful Life has always been on Moscow television. (Class of 2013, #46)

Two Koreas have always been members of the UN. (Class of 2013, #67)

Official racial classifications in South Africa have always been outlawed. (Class of 2013, #68)

Conflict in Northern Ireland has always been slowly winding down. (Class of 2013, #71)

Czechoslovakia has never existed. (Class of 2014, #32)

American companies have always done business in Vietnam. (Class of 2014, #41)

They have never worried about a Russian missile strike on the U.S. (Class of 2014, #68)

Japan has always been importing rice. (Class of 2015, #17)

The Communist Party has never been the official political party in Russia. (Class of 2015, #23)

Russian courts have always had juries. (Class of 2015, #46)

Folks in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City have always been able to energize with Pepsi Cola. (Class of 2015, #67)

The Sistine Chapel ceiling has always been brighter and cleaner. (Class of 2016, #75)

The Mindset List mavens do their research by looking at 18-year-old newspapers. Each year’s list consists mostly of confused references to things that happened 18 years earlier. Some of these things happened in other countries and most of these things are not going to be “cultural touchstones” for incoming college freshmen in the United States.

The 21 above items from the Classes of 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 & 2016 and (with one exception) are set entirely in foreign countries. Many of them are at least peripheral to the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Children growing up after the end of the Cold War had a different set of fears and understandings of the world than those of us who had to worry “about a Russian missile strike on the U.S.” (the item that gets to the point). This is a worthy point to make about the “mindset” of recent students, but it is obfuscated with references to such trivia as the availability of Big Macs, juries and “It’s a Wonderful Life” in Russia.

The end of apartheid was another big deal; college students throughout the U.S. demonstrated against it. But what’s with the Royal New Zealand Navy’s daily ration of rum, one of the most obscure references on any of the Mindset lists?

Taken together, the above items demonstrate a failure of the Mindset crew to be able to synthesize things that happened 18 years ago into any useful information about the mindset of incoming college students.

Slavery has always been unconstitutional in Mississippi, and Southern Baptists have always been apologizing for supporting it in the first place. (Class of 2016, #38)

Slavery has been unconstitutional in Mississippi since 1865 when the 13th Amendment was ratified. Mississippi approved the amendment in 1995 (although that decision wasn’t sent to the U.S. Archivist until 2013), but this had no effect upon the constitutionality of slavery in Mississippi. A basic civics lesson would seem to be in order for the Mindset brain trust.

Southern Baptists did pass a resolution apologizing for their past support of slavery in 1995 (which is different than “always have been apologizing.”)

As with many Mindset List items, the primary problem with this one is not its factual accuracy—although it’s amazing how the List can screw up even the simplest facts in the interest of including the words “always been”—but that it claims that obscure events that happened when the class in question were babies shape its “mindset.”

Their folks have never gazed with pride on a new set of bound encyclopedias on the bookshelf.  (Class of 2016, #18)

The final edition of Encyclopedia Britannica was published in 2010 and the print version of that encyclopedia wasn’t discontinued until 2012. World Book Encyclopedia is still available as bound volumes.

Bound encyclopedias were common in the 1970s and 1980s when the parents of the Class of 2016 were growing up, thus many of them likely had bound encyclopedias on their bookshelf.

Computers have never lacked a CD-ROM disk drive. (Class of 2014, #27)

CD-ROM drives were replaced by DVD-ROM drives in the early 2000s. When the Class of 2014 were high school sophomores, Apple began selling MacBook Airs with no optical drives of any kind.

They should keep their eyes open for Justin Bieber or Dakota Fanning at freshman orientation. (Class of 2016, #1)

Dakota Fanning was a freshman at New York University during the 2011-12 academic year. She is part of the Class of 2015.

Justin Bieber is not currently attending college.

Ketchup has always been a vegetable. (Class of 2003, #36)

In 1981, the USDA proposed reclassifying ketchup as a vegetable in subsidized school lunch program requirements. The proposal was criticized and ridiculed. It was never enacted. Thus, ketchup was never a vegetable for the Class of 2003.

Adams, Cecil. 2004. “Did the Reagan-era USDA really classify ketchup as a vegetable?” The Straight Dope, July 16.

Major League Baseball has never had fewer than three divisions and never lacked a wild card entry in the playoffs. (Class of 2015, #61)

Major League Baseball went to four divisions in 1969, around a quarter of a century before the Class of 2015 was born. Since 1994, there have been six divisions. MLB has never had just three divisions.

It just isn’t that difficult to look this stuff up.

There has always been football in Jacksonville but never in Los Angeles. (Class of 2016, #14)

This will be a surprise to members of the Class of 2016 matriculating at UCLA or USC.

Buffy has always been meeting her obligations to hunt down Lothos and the other blood-suckers at Hemery High. (Class 2014, #6)

Buffy the Vampire Slayer attended Hemery High in her eponymous film, which was released in 1992, when much of the Class of 2014 was born. That film ends with her killing Lothos.

Members of the Class of 2014 may have watched the Buffy the Vampire TV series, which ended production when they were around 11 years old. In that show Buffy neither fought Lothos or attended Hemery High. She was a student at Sunnydale High, graduated, and then matriculated at UC-Sunnydale.

This is a mistake that illustrates the slapdash mindlessness of the Mindset List. If something happened in the class’s assigned birth year, it has “always” been happening—even if it stopped happening!

All that matters is that the Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie came out in in 1992. Have members of the class watched the film? Or the TV show? Did they like either one of them? Is either one a “cultural touchstone”? Could Ron Nief or Tom McBride have bothered to talk to some members of the class about these questions? Or survey them? Could they have bothered to watch the movie or the TV show? Or read something about them? Or have someone fact check their list? If you don’t know the answers to these questions, you don’t know the Mindset List.

Clarence Thomas has always sat on the Supreme Court. (Class of 2012, #22)

Ruth Bader Ginsburg has always sat on the Supreme Court. (Class of 2014, #67)

Stephen Breyer has always been an Associate Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. (Class of 2016, #36)

An August 2012 poll found that two-thirds of Americans couldn’t name any Supreme Court Justices. Sixteen percent of respondents named Clarence Thomas and 13% named Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Stephen Breyer is the most obscure Justice; only 3% of respondents named him.

Cultural touchstones? Not so much.

Eder, Steve. 2012. “Most Americans Can’t Name a U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Survey Says.” Wall Street Journal Law Blog, Aug. 20.