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Beloit College Mindset List – Class of 2011

Last year just around this time, I lamented the fall of Pluto from its planetary pedestal. In that context, I mused over the oddity of a future generation of children growing up with eight planets in their solar system, unlike their parents who counted nine in their sky. I wrote the following comments regarding the loss of Pluto and the generational paradigm shift:

"Bummer! I will miss Pluto. But why? I have never visited Pluto and don’t expect to in the future. I haven’ even seen Pluto. My life is not affected by whether Pluto is or is not a planet. I never think about Pluto until the subject of planets comes up, which in my day to day life, is not often. But what I learnt in childhood about the planets is etched in my mind and in that memory, Pluto is the faraway ninth planet in our own celestial neighborhood, the solar system. I feel reluctant to shake off the notion, if for no other reason than dogged sentimentality.  It is indeed interesting how casual  familiarity with objects and ideas shapes our view of the world … and the universe.  New words enter the lexicon every few years.  New gadgets enter our homes.  New knowledge enters the body of human wisdom. With advancing age, some find the changes unsettling. Most  however, adjust to  new facts and revise their outlook.  But what we learn in our childhood and early youth is our most "natural" knowledge and that is the most enduring yardstick by which we measure the world around us.  And that is what in part, gives rise to the generation gap…

Each year in August, since 1998, Beloit College in Wisconsin compiles a list of ideas and objects which the entering class of students has grown up with and which are therefore expected to have shaped their world view and cultural mind set.  This list is famously known as The Beloit College Mindset List." (I have updated the link to this year)

School textbooks take a few years to update. Teachers need time to tailor their teaching material to meet the new standards of planetary eligibility. New charts and models of the solar system will have to be constructed. Assuming that school children learn elementary astronomy in the 2nd or 3rd grade, in which year will the Beloit College Mindset list include college students whose view of the universe did not include Pluto as a "real" planet?

Humvee Well, Beloit College has just published this year’s Mindset List for the Class of 2011- mostly kids born in 1989. For them, "Alvin Ailey, Andrei Sakharov, Huey Newton, Emperor Hirohito, Ted Bundy, Abbie Hoffman, and Don the Beachcomber have always been dead."  Here are a dozen more items that are and will be a part of the Class of 2011’s Zeitgeist:

  1. Humvees, minus the artillery, have always been available to the public.
  2. They never “rolled down” a car window.
  3. They have grown up with bottled water.
  4. General Motors has always been working on an electric car.
  5. Nelson Mandela has always been free and a force in South Africa.
  6. Religious leaders have always been telling politicians what to do, or else!
  7. “Off the hook” has never had anything to do with a telephone.
  8. Women have always been police chiefs in major cities.
  9. Wal-Mart has always been a larger retailer than Sears and has always employed more workers than GM.
  10. Time has always worked with Warner.
  11. The space program has never really caught their attention except in disasters.
  12. Burma has always been Myanmar.

The full list here. 

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8 responses to “Beloit College Mindset List – Class of 2011”

  1. bongopondit

    Thanks for pointing out the mindset list. I have often reflected on similar lines in the Indian context, where a similar list might include: India has never won a cricket World Cup, there has always been more than one channel on TV, Coke and Pepsi were always on the market, one had to wait a few years to get a land-line phone etc. Inspirations for a full post !

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  2. Ortho

    The “Mindset List” is more of a marketing gimmick than a window into the mindset of 18-year-old college freshman. Beloit College’s sample is too small to allow meaningful generalizations. When a majority of U.S. colleges and universities create similar mindset lists we can begin our armchair generalizations.
    I enjoy reading your blog.

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  3. Dean C. Rowan

    Meanwhile, get a load of this story about the perhaps more urgently focused mindset of college students in training. Such cynicism!
    Add to the Beloit list: Nothing is safe against gratuitous ranking or enumeration.

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  4. Ruchira Paul

    Steven Roy Goodman, an independent college counselor, tells clients to make a small mistake somewhere in their application — on purpose.
    “Sometimes it’s a typo,” he says. ”I don’t want my students to sound like robots. It’s pretty easy to fall into that trap of trying to do everything perfectly and there’s no spark left.”
    This is priceless! To be “authentic” one must make a “deliberate” mistake? Wow. That’s like carefully crumpling up your shirt in order to prove you don’t give a damn if you look dishevelled!
    I think this “authenticity” kick has been in the making for a while. My daughter’s college applications required her to write mostly uplifting things like her aspirations and plans to change the world for the better. By the time my son entered college four years later, I remember he wrote two essays. One was of the usual variety about plans and dreams etc. The other one, for the honors program that he applied to had something to do with a childhood belief he had to reject in adolescence and why. And no, it couldn’t be about the Tooth Fairy or Santa. Not quite the self-flagellation that colleges seem to want now but still, it required the applicant to examine a disappointing / disillusioning experience.

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  5. Ruchira Paul

    Bongo:
    I’ll look forward to your Mindset List for Indian youngsters grown up in the last twenty years or so. BTW, when I was a child growing up, Coke, Pepsi and 7Up were “always” around. It was sometime later, don’t remember exactly when, that they disappeared and we had to make do with Limca, Fanta (but isn’t that Coke?) and “nimboo pani.” I know nothing of cricket World Cup but the Indian teams of my era used to win a fair share of the five day Test matches.
    Ortho:
    I don’t know if the marketing ploy works for Beloit. After all how many students are likely to choose a college for its “Mindset List?” It is a nice bit of publicity though. I doubt (although I am not sure) that Beloit compiles the list by interviewing its own students. I think they go by political, cultural and consumer history. But I do agree that the list is “narrow.” Indeed, it doesn’t apply to most 22 year olds in the world except for the global facts. Just like BongoPondit said above your comment that he wants to make a list for India which I am sure will look quite different from the Beloit version. I’m glad you like this blog – please visit again.

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  6. Anna

    I don’t know if it means anything, but “nimboo pani” seems like an excellent name for a soda. “Limca,” on the other hand, is terrible. Sounds creepily connected to “lymph” or the limbic system. “7-up” has always sounded like a card game or form of robbery to me. None of this is very relevant to this post, of course. Just dropping in here…
    Another Tangential Response:

    “I think this ‘authenticity’ kick has been in the making for a while. My daughter’s college applications required her to write mostly uplifting things like her aspirations and plans to change the world for the better.”
    My undergraduate application for transfer to Columbia demanded a “personal essay,” elaborating that they wanted childhood stories, private hopes and dreams, etc. I responded with an organized argument as to why I found the demand problematic. I remember noting that fishing for anecdotes about experience seemed like an indirect and imperfect way of getting at how that background information might shape the “life of the mind”– noting authors such as Flannery O’Connor and Emily Dickinson who led incredibly circumscribed exterior, but rich interior, lives; that insofar as it was designed to get at that incohate thing called “character,” it might screen out unpleasant people who I might nonetheless want in my classes– I remember using Gaugin, a womanizer who left his wife and child destitute, and Heidegger, a committed Nazi, as examples; and that it was an unnecessary invasion of privacy. As to this last, I discussed the case of Gina Grant, a young woman who had been accepted, then rejected, from Columbia as well as Harvard and a host of other schools (she was admitted into Brown), when it was found out that as an adolescent she had brutally murdered her abusive mother. My ultimate conclusion was that schools should just have a section titled “Essay” or “Other” and let applicants fill it how they wanted: with philosophic musings, a gorgeous piece of art, an interesting proof, etc.
    The essay I wrote still strikes me as a funny thing to have done, and I had a ball writing it– it helped that my main reason for applying to transfer was to follow a boyfriend, and I was of two minds over whether the transfer, let alone the essay, was a good idea at all (as such things usually go, the transfer worked out, though the boyfriend, thank goodness, didn’t). Hard to imagine, though, the essay going over well post-Columbine, Virgina Tech, etc. I’d have to reread the essay to see how my own feelings might have shifted. I still have a very healthy respect for privacy, like thinking that we can create a retreat from the detritus of everyday life for intellectual discourse if we so choose, and dislike coaching kids into selling themselves like empty little marketing bundles of Overcome Personal Adversity and Save the World While Admitting That Sometimes I’m Too Detail Oriented sunshine. But surely there’s a healthy balance to be struck in terms of those concerns and universities’ probing to get a sense of what needs students carry with them to campus.
    Just ruminating…back to my lawyer work (the primary thing that my essay over a decade ago clearly predicted).

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  7. bongopondit

    Ruchira: I think it was around 1977 when George Fernandez ‘threw out’ most foreign companies. I grew up with Thumbs Up and such, and the re-introduction of Coke and Pepsi in the Indian markets circa 1988 or so was a major event.

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  8. Ruchira Paul

    Nimboo Pani = limeade/ lemonade. Always made with fresh citrus. Ah, I forgot Thumbs Up as I did Campa Cola, made to look and taste like Coke.
    Anna, your account of the gutsy and unorthodox challenge you sent by way of your college essay to Columbia was very interesting. But you are right. How much are they “really” learning about the character of the incoming students through a carefully arranged set of accomplishments and failures? And how much “authenticity” can they stomach? Could Gina Grant (I remember her) have got in at most places with a candid, “I killed my mom?” I don’t know what Seung-Hui Cho wrote in his application essay to Virginia Tech but he sure sent out some loud and clear messages in the ones he wrote for his creative writing class. Only one professor was alarmed. I have heard that colleges are now scouring My Space type pages of their prospective students. Any truth in that?
    Speaking of Flannery O’Connor, I had previously read just a couple or three of her short stories. I have just begun a thick volume – “The Complete Stories.” I wonder if she had to write an essay for her admission to the Univ. of Iowa and what she would have put in it. To the list of quiet exterior vs rich interior, I would add Harper Lee, a veritable recluse and just one fabulous book to her name.
    Also Anna, for someone whose comments are always interesting and often more illuminating than the related post, I am sure A.B. writers miss seeing you on the front pages. With lawyering and other pre-occupations, if you don’t find time, how about posting that essay you wrote for Columbia? :-)

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