BELOIT, Wisconsin — Thousands of incoming freshmen who are moving into dorms at local colleges this week have never licked a postage stamp or experienced a world without Google.
This is according to the “Mindset List,” an annual project released by Wisconsin’s Beloit College that looks at various aspects in the lives of each year’s incoming college freshmen.
The Mindset List for the class of 2019, many of whom were born in 1997, is a series of historical and cultural references understood by this particular sect of the population, as well as a guide for teachers and counselors who are trying to relate to this generation of students.
This year’s list was compiled by Beloit professors Tom McBride, Charles Westerberg and Ron Nief. The co-authors listed 50 items under the title, “Since they have been on the planet.”
A few entries on this year’s list include:
• They have grown up treating Wi-Fi as an entitlement.
• The announcement of someone being the “first woman” to hold a position has only impressed their parents.
• The proud parents recorded their first steps on camcorders, “mounted on their shoulders like bazookas.”
• TV has always been in such high definition that they could see the pores of actors and the grimaces of quarterbacks.
• Email has become the new “formal” communication, while texts and tweets remain enclaves for the casual.
In a video released on Beloit College’s YouTube page, the study’s authors discussed the overarching themes of this year’s list. These themes include collaborative learning, shifting of social sensibilities and the effect of technology.
“They text all day, they chat all day, they’re on social media all day — they’re a collaborative sharing generation,” McBride said. “This makes them uniquely qualified for collaborative learning, which I think is going to be bigger and bigger all the time in American higher education.”
The authors also spoke about how the list can be used as a tool for teachers and professors in today’s society.
“This list in effect takes you in a nuanced way as a teacher to consider what it is students already know as the basis for what it is that you’re going to teach them,” McBride said.
Westerberg added that “it is a way to truly plug into the different mindsets that are out there and try to understand them.”
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