With the exam results season of 2015 slowly drawing to a close, hundreds of thousands of student from across the UK are finalising their higher education plans.
As of midnight on Tuesday 18 August, admissions body Ucas confirmed a total of 467,110 people had been placed in full-time UK higher education – the highest number of students to head to university to date.
According to the Beloit College in Wisconsin, America, many of these degree-seekers will mostly be 18-years-old and were born in 1997, meaning Princess Diana, Notorious B.I.G., Jacques Cousteau, and Mother Teresa are just some of the many high-profile names whose lives they will never have witnessed.
Having released its 18th annual Mindset List for this year’s entering Class of 2019, staff at the institution say this group of young people will also never have never licked a postage stamp, have been raised thinking of Wi-Fi as an entitlement, and will think of Google to have been around since the beginning of time.
Born in the same year as Dolly the sheep, Kylie Jenner, and Michael ‘Prince’ Jackson Jr., the list outlines how, since these students have been on the planet:
They have avidly joined Harry Potter, Ron, and Hermione as they built their reading skills through all seven volumes
Scotland and Wales have always had their own parliaments and assemblies
Phish Food has always been available from Ben and Jerry
TV has always been in such high definition that they could see the pores of actors
Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic have always been members of NATO
Hong Kong has always been under Chinese rule
The Lion King has always been on Broadway
Email has become the new ‘formal’ communication while texts and tweets remain enclaves for the ‘casual’
Mobile phones have become so ubiquitous in class that teachers don’t know which students are using them to take notes and which ones are planning a party
Their parents have gone from encouraging them to use the Internet to begging them to get off it
…and there has always been a Beloit College Mindset List
Charles Westerberg, professor of Sociology at Beloit College, described how the entering Class of 2019 will encounter difficult discussions about privilege, race, and sexual assault while on campus.
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.”
As well as this, he said, students will need a keen ability to decipher what is the same and what has changed in regards to several of these issues.
Providing an interesting insight into the cultural touchstones which shape the lives of students heading to university next month, this year’s Mindset List also includes a selection of terms which academic staff will need to understand if they are going to communicate effectively with students.
