Class of 2014

Every year, Beloit College releases the "Mindset List," supposedly capturing the mindset of new college students. It's a very strange, rather masochistic annual tradition, where people all over America read these lists specifically so they can feel old and irrelevant.

The lists have never been a very accurate barometer of what kids know and don't know. (When I was a kid the lists kept saying I'd never heard of stuff like Watergate and Laugh In, like I'd grown up in a locked basement without a TV or something.) But this year's list seems particularly odd and out-of-touch. Check out number six:

6. Buffy has always been meeting her obligations to hunt down Lothos and the other blood-suckers at Hemery High.

Okay, first: Buffy? That seems like kind of a dated reference. Aren't today's kids a lot more into Twilight and crap like that? Second, does whoever wrote this list realize that Buffy's story continued beyond the 1992 movie? In the movie she fought Lothos at Hemery High, but in the later, much more popular TV series, she attended Sunnydale High and Lothos played no part.

And then we get to this baffler at number nine:

9. Had it remained operational, the villainous computer HAL could be their college classmate this fall, but they have a better chance of running into Miley Cyrus’s folks on Parents’ Weekend.

Hal 9000? From 2001: A Space Odyssey? According to 2010: The Year We Make Contact, in 2010 Hal is re-activated after murdering the Discovery crew in 2001, briefly assists the scientists aboard the Leonov and then sacrifices himself as part of all that weird "All these worlds are yours except Europa" stuff. So, where does Hal find time in all that to go to college? That's at least as baffling as anything Dave Bowman experienced before the aliens turned him into the floating star baby.

And then there's #53:

53. J.R. Ewing has always been dead and gone. Hasn’t he? 

Well, according to Wikipedia, J.R.'s not dead. He was last seen in some 1998 TV movie, alive and well and getting up to his usual mischief. If any of today's kids have even heard of J.R. Ewing, why would they assume he was dead?

Frankly this seems less like a list of stuff that today's kids think, and more like your grandpa's list of stuff that he thinks today's kids think.