What Will Class of 2011 Remember?

Beloit College's Mindset List® For the Class of 2011

Most of the students entering college this fall, members of the Class of 2011, were born in 1989. For them Ricky Nelson, Richard Burton, Samantha Smith, Laura Ashley, Orson Welles, Karen Ann Quinlan, Benigno Aquino, and the U.S. Football League have always been dead.

1. They'll ask, "What was the Berlin Wall?"
2. Humvees, minus the artillery, have always been available to the public.
3. Rush Limbaugh and the “Dittoheads” have always been lambasting liberals.
4. They never “rolled down” a car window.
5. They may confuse the Keating Five with a rock group.
6. They have grown up with bottled water.
7. General Motors has always been working on an electric car.
8. Nelson Mandela has always been free and a force in South Africa.
9. Pete Rose has never played baseball.
10. Rap music has always been mainstream.
11. Religious leaders have always been telling politicians what to do, or else!
12. “Off the hook” has never had anything to do with a telephone.
13. Music has always been “unplugged.”
14. Russia has always had a multi-party political system.
15. Women have always been police chiefs in major cities.
16. They were born the year Harvard Law Review Editor Barack Obama announced he might run for office some day.
17. Wal-Mart has always been a larger retailer than Sears and has always employed more workers than GM.
18. Being “lame” has to do with being dumb or inarticulate, not disabled.
19. Katie Couric has always had screen cred.
20. When all else fails, the Prozac defense has always been a possibility.
21. They grew up in Wayne’s World.
22. U2 has always been more than a spy plane.
23. They were introduced to Jack Nicholson as “The Joker.”245. Stadiums, rock tours and sporting events have always had corporate names.
24. American rock groups have always appeared in Moscow.
25. Commercial product placements have been the norm in films and on TV.
26. Fox has always been a major network.
27. They drove their parents crazy with the Beavis and Butt-Head laugh.
28. Women’s studies majors have always been offered on campus.
29. Being a latchkey kid has never been a big deal.
30. Thanks to MySpace and Facebook, autobiography can happen in real time.
31. They learned about JFK from Oliver Stone and Malcolm X from Spike Lee.
32. Most phone calls have never been private.
33. High definition television has always been available.
34. Virtual reality has always been available when the real thing failed.
35. Time has always worked with Warner.
36. Tiananmen Square is a 2008 Olympics venue, not the scene of a massacre.
37. MTV has never featured music videos.
38. The space program has never really caught their attention except in disasters.
39. They get much more information from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert than from the
newspaper.
40. They’re always texting 1 n other.
41. They will encounter roughly equal numbers of female and male professors in the classroom.
42. They never saw Johnny Carson live on television.
43. The World Wide Web has been an online tool since they were born.
44. Chronic fatigue syndrome has always been debilitating and controversial.
45. Burma has always been Myanmar.
46. Dilbert has always been ridiculing cubicle culture.
47. Food packaging has always included nutritional labeling.