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Beloit College Mindset List for the Class of 2012

I first brought up the Beloit College Mindset List, published annually around the start of each school year, in the context of Pluto losing its planetary status. To keep up that blogging tradition at A.B. From this year’s list of sixty, I am posting a dozen cultural mindset items that an eighteen year old today is likely to have grown up with. Think back to 1990 and come up with some of your own to add to the list. The experience of an 18 year old will of course vary according to where s/he was born.

Students entering college for the first time this fall were generally born in 1990.

For these students, Sammy Davis Jr., Jim Henson, Ryan White, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Freddy Krueger have always been dead.

  • Since they were in diapers, karaoke machines have been annoying people at parties.
  • GPS satellite navigation systems have always been available.
  • Coke and Pepsi have always used recycled plastic bottles.
  • Electronic filing of tax returns has always been an option.
  • WWW has never stood for World Wide Wrestling.
  • Films have never been X rated, only NC-17.
  • Clarence Thomas has always sat on the Supreme Court.
  • IBM has never made typewriters.
  • The Tonight Show has always been hosted by Jay Leno and started at 11:35 EST.
  • Caller ID has always been available on phones.
  • Muscovites have always been able to buy Big Macs.
  • Off-shore oil drilling in the United States has always been prohibited.
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2 responses to “Beloit College Mindset List for the Class of 2012”

  1. Andrew Rosenblum

    These milestones are all very frightening.

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  2. Dean C. Rowan

    A couple of these slightly exaggerate their own import. Films haven’t been X-rated, but X continues to signify “adult content.” Recall the early days of Google, when we learned about the surprises at hand searching for the Roman numeral XXX, expecting reports of the Super Bowl. IBM wasn’t making typewriters, but dang if you don’t find a decent working one even today in many business offices. Those Selectrics were solid! Here in Berkeley, there are at least a couple businesses called something like Berkeley Typewriter.
    There are others among the sixty I suppose I could quibble with, but one for me especially signifies the waning of a Golden Age c.1990:
    32. There has always been Pearl Jam.
    That alone explains a lot about the atrophy of popular musical culture.

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