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How Do You Define A College Freshman (Or Whatever)?

Beloit College
Tom McBride, left, Charles Westerberg and Ron Nief created this year's Beloit College Mindset List to describe incoming freshmen in the Class of 2019

It's that time again: A new crop of young people is entering colleges and universities around the world.

And, just as it has every summer since 1998, Beloit College is issuing its "Mindset List" to help define the factors that shaped those new freshmen -- or "first-years" or "freshies" or whatever new term may be applied by a given institution.

So who are these new students? Members of the entering college class of 2019 were mostly born in 1997 and have never licked a postage stamp, have assumed that  Wi-Fi is an entitlement, and have no first-hand experience of Princess Diana’s charismatic celebrity.

Those are three of the 50 factors on this year's Beloit College Mindset List, intended to provide a look at the cultural touchstones that shape the lives of students entering college. For them, there has always been Google; Email, informal to previous Millennials, has emerged as “the new formal” for them, while texting and other social media serve as the wild and wooly mode of exchange.

Teachers have had to work overtime encouraging them to move beyond the Web and consult sources in books and journals. And Poland has always been a member of NATO, suggesting that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s heartburn about Western expansion is at least as old as the new college kids are.

The list was inaugurated by Ron Nief, then the college's Director of Public Affairs, and Tom McBride, then a Professor of English and now (among other things) a Perspectives commentator on WNIJ.  Charles Westerberg, current director of the Liberal Arts in Practice Center and a Professor of Sociology, is also part of the team now.

“The Class of 2019 will enter college with high technology an increasing factor in how and even what they learn,” Westerberg said. “They will encounter difficult discussions about privilege, race, and sexual assault on campus."

These new students also will have a different concept of time benchmarks, he added. "They may think of the ‘last century’ as the twentieth, not the nineteenth, so they will need ever wider perspectives about the burgeoning mass of information that will be heading their way," Westerberg explained. "And they will need a keen ability to decipher what is the same and what has changed with respect to many of these issues.”

The Beloit College mindset web page also offers a guidefor teachers, counselors and others to discuss the students' attitudes toward various issues.

Who knows? It might even help parents start discussions at home.

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