Every year, Beloit College produces the Beloit College Mindset List: “a look at the cultural touchstones that shape the lives of students entering college.”
This year’s list is full of goodies of all sorts (3. The Green Giant has always been Shrek, not the big guy picking vegetables.) but I am particularly interested in the number of items on the list that speak to incoming students’ relationships to information and education:
4. They have never used a card catalog to find a book.
14. Text has always been hyper.
20. American students have always lived anxiously with high-stakes educational testing.
34. They have always been able to read books on an electronic screen.
35. Women have always outnumbered men in college.
36. We have always watched wars, coups, and police arrests unfold on television in real time.
48. Elite American colleges have never been able to fix the price of tuition.
50. Everyone has always known what the evening news was before the Evening News came on.
72. Migration of once independent media like radio, TV, videos and compact discs to the computer has never amazed them.
Feral Librarian 
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