My son enters Johnson & Wales University in about a week, so it was with great anticipation I awaited Beloit College’s annual mindset list and it was just released.

“This year’s entering college class of 2015 was born just as the Internet took everyone onto the information highway and as Amazon began its relentless flow of books and everything else into their lives.  Members of this year’s freshman class, most of them born in 1993, are the first generation to grow up taking the word “online” for granted and for whom crossing the digital divide has redefined research, original sources and access to information, changing the central experiences and methods in their lives. They have come of age as women assumed command of U.S. Navy ships, altar girls served routinely at Catholic Mass, and when everything from parents analyzing childhood maladies to their breaking up with boyfriends and girlfriends, sometimes quite publicly, have been accomplished on the Internet.”

Each August since 1998, Beloit College has released the Beloit College Mindset List, providing a look at the cultural touchstones that shape the lives of students entering college this fall. The creation of Beloit’s former Public Affairs Director Ron Nief and Keefer Professor of the Humanities Tom McBride, it was originally created as a reminder to faculty to be aware of dated references, and quickly became a catalog of the rapidly changing worldview of each new generation.

Mindset List websites at Beloit College and at mindsetmoment.com, the media site webcast and their Facebook page receive more than a million hits annually.

“As for the class of 2015, without any memory whatever of George Herbert Walker Bush as president, they came into existence as Bill Clinton came into the presidency. Their parents, frequently older than one might expect because women have always been able to get pregnant almost regardless of age, have hovered over them with extra care and have agreed with those states that mandated the wearing of bike helmets. Ferris Bueller could be their overly cautious dad, and Jimmy Carter is an elderly smiling public man who appears occasionally on television doing good works. “Dial-up,” Woolworths and the Sears “Big Book” are as antique to them as “talking machines” might have been to their grandparents. Meanwhile, as they’ve wondered why O.J. Simpson has always been suspected of something, they have all “been there, done that, gotten the T-shirt,” shortened boring conversations with “yadda, yadda, yadda,” and recognized LBJ as LeBron James.”

“For those who cannot comprehend that it has been 18 years since this year’s class was born, they will quickly confirm that the next four years will go even faster and, like the rest of us, they will continue to grow older at increasing speed.”

Here are a few items on the list:

• There has always been an Internet ramp onto the information highway.
• Ferris Bueller and Sloane Peterson could be their parents.
• States and Velcro parents have always been requiring that they wear their bike helmets.
• The only significant labor disputes in their lifetimes have been in major league sports.
• There have always been at least two women on the Supreme Court, and women have always commanded U.S. Navy ships.
• They “swipe” cards, not merchandise.
• As they’ve grown up on websites and cell phones, adult experts have constantly fretted about their alleged deficits of empathy and concentration.
• Their school’s “blackboards” have always been getting smarter.
• “Don’t touch that dial!”….what dial?
• American tax forms have always been available in Spanish.
• More Americans have always traveled to Latin America than to Europe.
• Amazon has never been just a river in South America.
• Refer to LBJ, and they might assume you’re talking about LeBron James.
• All their lives, Whitney Houston has always been declaring “I Will Always Love You.”
• O.J. Simpson has always been looking for the killers of Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman.
• Women have never been too old to have children.
• Japan has always been importing rice.
• Jim Carrey has always been bigger than a pet detective.
• We have never asked, and they have never had to tell.
• Life has always been like a box of chocolates.

For this year’s complete list and more about Beloit College, go here.