Something new about Beloit College Mindset List

Every Spring or Fall, millions of students enter college for the first time in the United States. As universities and colleges prepare for the coming academic year, Beloit College in Wisconsin has been releasing the Beloit College Mindset List. The seventy items which are enlisted in this list provide a thorough look at the cultural hallmarks that mold the lives of contemporary first year college students.

However, critics of the Beloit College Mindset List point out how undue risks are often taken in some cases while making generalizations. This is quite a valid point as students at Beloit College come from every state of USA and also from other nations.

Ron Nief has been director of public affairs at Beloit College in Wisconsin for the past ten years, following two decades at Middlebury College in Vermont. He has been communicating the work of higher education institutions for almost 40 years, starting with his alma mater, Boston College, in the late 1960s. He is the editor of several books and has written for the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Christian Science Monitor, the Gannett Newspapers and National Public Radio’s Marketplace.

The Mindset List, conceived by Tom McBride, Keefer Professor of the Humanities and Ron Nief, director of public affairs at Beloit College, is a set of touchstones that shape the lives of Gen Y students entering college this fall. The material is gathered from parents, current students, faculty, anonymous contributors who call and email ideas, and through researching a wide range of media — from Rolling Stone to the Wall Street Journal — published around the time these students were born. McBride and Nief say the Mediasite webcast is the perfect avenue to explain how the list originated, and why it’s become such a cultural phenomenon. In the webcast, the list authors provide deeper insight into key patterns that emerge, and ultimately will need to be addressed, as this generation moves into the workforce, such as transparency vs. privacy, sustainability and multiculturalism.

Unlike the perception of many the Beloit College Mindset List is not a chronological listing of events that have occurred in the year that the first year students were born. For instance, the members of the Class of 2008 will be around 18 years old and this list intends to reflect their frame of mind shaped up over the years. It is also not intended to reveal the colossal disparities in the outlook of the faculty and students.

Seated at left is Tom McBride, Professor of English and Gayle and William Keefer Professor of the Humanities, and at right is Ron Nief, director of public affairs at Beloit College. Each year, they work together compiling suggestions and releasing the final version of the highly anticipated Beloit College Mindset List.