From the Beloit College Mindset List:
Born when Ross Perot was warning about a giant sucking sound and Bill Clinton was apologizing for pain in his marriage, members of this fall’s entering college class of 2014 have emerged as a post-email generation for whom the digital world is routine and technology is just too slow. …
The class of 2014 has never found Korean-made cars unusual on the Interstate and five hundred cable channels, of which they will watch a handful, have always been the norm. Since “digital” has always been in the cultural DNA, they’ve never written in cursive and with cell phones to tell them the time, there is no need for a wrist watch. Dirty Harry (who’s that?) is to them a great Hollywood director. The America they have inherited is one of soaring American trade and budget deficits; Russia has presumably never aimed nukes at the United States and China has always posed an economic threat. …
Most students entering college for the first time this fall—the Class of 2014—were born in 1992.
- For these students, Benny Hill, Sam Kinison, Sam Walton, Bert Parks and Tony Perkins have always been dead.
- Few in the class know how to write in cursive.
- Email is just too slow, and they seldom if ever use snail mail.
- “Go West, Young College Grad” has always implied “and don’t stop until you get to Asia…and learn Chinese along the way.”
- Al Gore has always been animated.
- Los Angelenos have always been trying to get along.
- Buffy has always been meeting her obligations to hunt down Lothos and the other blood-suckers at Hemery High.
- “Caramel macchiato” and “venti half-caf vanilla latte” have always been street corner lingo.
