The Beloit College Mindset List

Back in August, 1969 (gasp!), 18-year-old Bilbo began his freshman year at Penn State University. The pterodactyls had recently gone off the endangered species list, having finally died out. Richard Nixon was president, war was raging in Vietnam, gas cost about 35 cents a gallon, and the first man had walked on the moon less than a month before.

Most students start their freshman year of college at the tender age of 18, and so most of those who head to leafy college campuses this month were born around 1990. The world in which they grew up is quite different from the one that shaped Bilbo in 1969.

Each August for the past 11 years, Beloit College, Wisconsin, has released its annual Mindset List. Created by Beloit’s Professor Tom McBride and Public Affairs Director Ron Nief, the list is designed to help the faculty and staff relate to the new students, and provides a unique annual summary of the rapidly changing frame of reference for each new generation.

You can read the Mindset List for the Class of 2012 here, and you can also link to the lists for each of the previous years the list has been published. It’s interesting and, for a person my age, a little sobering. Here are a few of the items from the list that particularly caught my attention:

Gas stations have never fixed flats, but most serve cappuccino. In 1969, "service stations" offered "service." They would pump your gas for you, check the oil, water, and tire pressure, and wash your windshield. You usually paid cash; if you used a credit card, the attendant used a little machine that imprinted your card on a multi-part carbon receipt...and you didn't worry that someone was going to steal your card number from the carbon.

Girls in head scarves have always been part of the school fashion scene. In 1969, girls made their political statements by not wearing bras or shaving their legs or underarms. The religious ones all belonged to the Campus Crusade for Christ and annoyed you by asking you about the Four Spiritual Laws while you were trying to ... well ... never mind.

The Warsaw Pact is as hazy for them as the League of Nations was for their parents. Well, let's not be too hasty on this one...with Russia kicking Georgian butt, some truncated version of the old Warsaw Pact may yet be back. And the United Nations will continue to be just as vibrant and useful as the League of Nations.

Personal privacy has always been threatened. Thanks to Messrs Bush, Cheney, and Chertoff, we're doing a marvelous job of protecting ourselves from ... ourselves.

And,

The Windows 3.0 operating system made IBM PCs user-friendly the year they were born. I typed all my term papers with a manual typewriter. My Computer Science 101 class involved laboriously writing out programs in longhand, then sitting at a loud machine to turn them into punched cards that a Staff Geek fed into a huge mainframe computer to generate a list of error messages. Today, I'm writing this blog on an iMac running OS-Leopard with a virtual machine inside running MS-Vista. No questions, please, I don't understand it, either...I just use it. And punched cards at least made useful bookmarks in a pinch.

I suddenly feel old. Not as old as Mike, but old, nevertheless.

This guy was a freshman in 1969:

He's a little older...and a lot more irreverent...39 years later:

How's your mindset? And for those of you reading this blog overseas, what were the things that shaped your mindset when you headed off to college?

Interesting to reflect, isn't it?

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo