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.
If you want to feel old, you can read their entire list here. What I thought was interesting were the technological items that you wouldn’t think have taken hold as much as they have. Here are a few examples of what today’s college freshman have grown up with and known their entire lives:
Few in the class know how to write in cursive.
Email is just too slow, and they seldom if ever use snail mail.
“Caramel macchiato” and “venti half-caf vanilla latte” have always been street corner lingo.
DNA fingerprinting and maps of the human genome have always existed.
Computers have never lacked a CD-ROM disk drive.
They’ve never recognized that pointing to their wrists was a request for the time of day.
The first computer they probably touched was an Apple II; it is now in a museum.
Having hundreds of cable channels but nothing to watch has always been routine.
They first met Michelangelo when he was just a computer virus.
They have never worried about a Russian missile strike on the U.S.
I know these are a bit older, but I still have trouble explaining to kids that software used to come on huge 5.25” floppy disks and that noisy modems used to connect us to the new Internet at whopping speeds of 14.4K!
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