Submitted for your amusement and edification, the Beloit College Mindset List for Class of 2016 was just released. It’s at their website at: http://themindsetlist.com/
From the preamble: “They have never needed an actual airline “ticket,” a set of bound encyclopedias, or Romper Room.”
The most important item is: 30. There have always been blue M&Ms, but no tan ones.
I didn’t really find any of them particularly insightful or mind-blowing.
Now when the list has stuff like ‘The NYC World Trade Center never existed in their lifetime’ or ‘flying cars have always been powered by cold-fusion’…
I’m kind of embarrassed that a college graduate wrote that list, let alone a college professor. It reads like they pulled up the wiki article for 1994 and added “There’s always been…” in front of each item.
And you can tell the author is a million years old: There’s always been Aleve! Robert Osbourne has always been on Turner Classic Movies!
Yeah, doing this every year means that whoever writes it has to somehow come up with something that distinguishes it from the same list for the previous year… But not a lot change in just one year, especially when we’re talking about kids not remembering stuff which gives at least 4-6 years of leeway for being “too young to remember” something that technically existed or was standard within one’s lifetime.
It’d be better to do this every 10 years; every 5 tops. Like a HS reunion type of thing.
I find these lists entertaining, but ultimately useless. At some point, it’s inevitable–my parents didn’t grow up with television, but I did; my grandparents didn’t grow up with radio, but my parents did; my grandparents didn’t grow up with slavery, but my great-grandparents did (although they were in Wisconsin and the Indian Territory [later Oklahoma] at the time, but they grew up during the slavery period).
I suspect that these lists don’t give kids enough credit. I can’t speak for THIS year’s college kids, but I also looked at the list for people born in 1980 and even though I was born a few years AFTER that, when I was 18 I was still aware of many of the cultural references that list refers to.
For example:
I knew about Reagan being shot, the Challenger exploding, what Pong was (even played it once), and what a broken record was.
My family had a black & white TV when I was young.
If by “beige” he means those light brown M&Ms, yes, I remember those and I do recall the blue M&ms being a novelty.
We did NOT have cable when I was young. True, many kids my age did grow up watching cable (hence why my fiance has fond memories of Nickelodeon shows I never watched), but I wouldn’t say that it was uncommon for people to have just the basic TV channels when I was a kid.
I knew about catchphrases like “Where’s the beef?” and “Who shot JR?”.
I remember Johnny Carson being the host of the Tonight Show.
I remember styrofoam McDonald’s containers.
I not only have heard of the bands Kansas, Boston, Chicago, America, and Alabama but I’ve also heard songs from them.
Sure, it is good to keep in mind that some kids may not understand things that happened when they were young or shortly before they were born, but I think many kids are savvy enough to be aware of these events. It’s not like people stop talking about major historical events right after they happen.
Why would they even include that in a list about people born in 1980? Tan M&Ms went away in 1995, so they were teenagers when it happened. I was born in 1988 and I can remember it (my dad and I voted in the phone poll, in fact).