. . .check out the The Beloit College Mindset List. You might be way ahead of me on this, but every year since 1998, when it was started by Professor Tom McBride and then-Public Affairs Director Ron Nief, folks at Beloit College in Wisconsin have been looking at emerging and fading cultural touchstones. This year’s list focuses on the students who entered college as freshmen last September (the Class of 2014, most of whom were born in 1992. The full list offers 75 observations, but here are a few that really hit me:
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.
8. With increasing numbers of ramps, Braille signs, and handicapped parking spaces, the world has always been trying harder to accommodate people with disabilities.
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.
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.
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.
29. Reggie Jackson has always been enshrined in Cooperstown.
32. Czechoslovakia has never existed.
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.
38. Bud Selig has always been the Commissioner of Major League Baseball.
46. Nirvana is on the classic oldies station.
55. Rock bands have always played at presidential inaugural parties.
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.
75. Honda has always been a major competitor on Memorial Day at Indianapolis.
The one I find most amazing: They’ve never recognized that pointing to their wrists was a request for the time of day.