Beloit College Mindset

Beloit College Mindset: Class of 2013

Each August since 1998, Beloit College has released the Beloit College Mindset List. It provides a look at the cultural touchstones that shape the lives of students entering college. It is the creation of Beloit’s Keefer Professor of the Humanities Tom McBride and Emeritus Public Affairs Director Ron Nief.

Members of the class of 2013 won't be surprised when they can charge a latté on their cell phone and curl up in the corner to read a textbook on an electronic screen. The migration of once independent media—radio, TV, videos and CDs—to the computer has never amazed them. They have grown up in a politically correct universe in which multi-culturalism has been a given. It is a world organized around globalization, with McDonald's everywhere on the planet. Carter and Reagan are as distant to them as Truman and Eisenhower were to their parents. Tattoos, once thought "lower class," are, to them, quite chic. Everybody knows the news before the evening news comes on.

The class of 2013 heads off to college as tolerant, global, and technologically hip.

The Beloit College Mindset List for the Class of 2013
Most students entering college for the first time this fall were born in 1991.

. . . some of the 75 items on the List:

~ They have never used a card catalog to find a book.
~ Text has always been hyper.
~ They have never understood the meaning of R.S.V.P.
~ They have always lived anxiously with high-stakes educational testing.
~ State abbreviations in addresses have never had periods.
~ They have always been able to read books on an electronic screen.
~ There has always been a computer in the Oval Office.
~ Cable television systems have always offered telephone service and vice versa.
~ There has always been a Cartoon Network.
~ They have always watched wars, coups, and police arrests unfold on television in real time.
~ There have always been flat screen televisions.