Every year, before I start teaching I like to think about the cultural background of the incoming freshmen class. It helps me teach and relate to them. It’s also pretty interesting to think about.
This year, I decided write some of those thoughts down. I’m assuming that the average incoming freshmen student was born in 1990.
With that in mind, here’s 16 things you should know about the incoming freshman college students.
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They weren’t alive in the 80s!
I just had to get this one out of the way. I know you can do the math when I told you above that they were born in 1990, but it is somehow more shocking when you put it this way.
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They have lived almost half of their life during the US War on Terror.
They were about eleven years old on September 11. When Bush leaves office they will be pushing 19 years of age.So, 8 out of those 19 years will have been lived during the Bush administration’s war on terror.I started to become politically aware around the age of 9. If that’s somewhere close to average, then for almost all of their politically aware lives Bush has been president and we have been fighting his elusive axis of evil.
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They weren’t alive when the Internet really started to take off.
I know there is some debate about when the internet really took off, but I remember watching TV one day and seeing an internet address on a television commercial in prime time. It was 1995. I marked that as the year that the internet was demonstrably HUGE. So, it was still a pretty big deal in 1990 – when they were born.
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They weren’t alive for MacGyver or Alf.
OK. I cheated on this one. MacGyver aired from 1985-1992, but let’s be honest – do the last two seasons really count? No. Which means they weren’t alive for MacGyver. Even if you count the last two seasons – they were only two years old when it went off the air which means they weren’t alive for most of MacGyver.They definately weren’t alive for Alf. They also turned two during the last season of The Cosby Show.
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Seinfeld and The Simpsons first aired a year before they were born.
They missed MacGyver, Alf, and the Cosby show, but they also pretty much missed Seinfeld and most of the early Simpsons.Both shows launched in 1989. If you count the Simpson shorts on the Tracey Ullman Show, then the Simpsons have been around since 1987 – three years before they were born.
Oh, and they were only four years old when Friends and ER first launched.
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They weren’t alive when the Berlin Wall came down
That’s right. The Berlin Wall came down in 1989.You wanna know something else? If you assume that the cold war ended with the fall of communism in Russia – they were only a year old when the cold war ended.They have no recollection of any of the incredibly ironically awesome 80s propoganda films unless they showed up on TBS marathons in the mid90s.
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MC Hammer and Vanillla Ice had the two most popular albums in the year of their birth.
In 1990 MC Hammer’s album Please Don’t Hurt ‘Em, Hammer dominated in sales for most of the year.It was soon trumped by Vanilla Ice’s first album.By 1991 everyone had Hammer pants and University of Miami sweatshirts. You Can’t Touch This and Word to Your Mother were part of the common vocabulary several years before they even had a mastery of the English language.
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They Probably Didn’t Really Start Listening To Rap Music until The Next Episode
Snoop Dogg’s best album came out when they were 3. Same goes for the Wu Tang Clan. They were 6 when Tupac was shot and 7 when Biggie was shot. If By the time they were listening to rap music Eminem was popular and Dr. Dre had a comeback album as everybody had already been acting like they forgot about Dre.They don’t remember The Chronic. It’s always been The Chronic 2.
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Computer Generated Animation Has Always Been the Norm.
Toy Story came out when they were five. By the time they were watching animated cartoons – computer generatred Pixar-style animation was pretty clearly the new norm.Kids who grew up on color television may have enjoyed watching Black-and-White TV, but they always wondered why people ever bothered to make black-and-white TV in the first place.I imagine there’s something similar going on here. Sure they watched and loved ordinary animation, but they grew up in CGI explosion, and I bet many of them wondered why we ever bothered with regular animation. -
No Saturday Morning Cartoons
I remember when I woke up one Saturday morning hankering for a bit of nostalgia and thought – Let me see what the kids are watching now. To my horror, there were no Saturday Morning Cartoons.Saturday Morning Cartoons were gone by the time they were old enough to start watching them.
NBC and CBS replaced the cartoon line-up in 1992 with morning shows. ABC followed suit in 1994.
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Nick-at-Nite TV was in Color
I remember when Nick-at-Nite played things like Dennis-the-Menace, My Three Sons, The Donna Reed Show, and Mr. Ed.Check out what the 1990s and 2000s line-up were. You see shows like Taxi, Welcome Back, Kotter, The Facts of Life, Diff’rent Strokes, Family Ties, The Wonder Years, The Brady Bunch, Laverne and Shirley, Mork and Mindy, and Cheers.
Most of their Nick-at-Nite TV was in color.
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They Weren’t Alive for the Original NES Heyday
Super Nintendo launched the year they were born which means they missed the regular Nintendo’s heyday.Here’s something else that’s intereseting. Assume that the advanced gamers in the group may have started playing video games around 4 or 5. I suspect that means that most of them did not really start playing video games seriously until 1996 or 1997. Playstation One had been out for three years and Playstation 2 was just three years on the horizon.
By the time they became really good gamers – they were into Playstation 2 or Xbox.
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They didn’t make cell phones the norm in high school. Their older brothers and sisters did.
It’s always seems to shock colleagues to think that these students will have always known cell phones are the norm in high school. But here’s something more shocking. Cell phones were the norm in high schools before these students even got to high school.Their older brothers and sisters were the real pioneers of cell phones in high school. By the time they hit high school, cell phones were the well established norm.
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Gas has always been over $1 (and over $3 when they started driving)
In 1990, average gas price was $1.16 a gallon.By the time they started driving it was 2006. That’s probably around the time that they actually paid attention to gas prices.So, by the time they could actually tell you what the price of a gallon of gas was – it was around $3 a gallon.
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Their Parents Are Not Baby Boomers
Assuming the last Baby Boomers were born 1960 and the average age of an incoming freshmen parent was 31 years of age in 1990, the average parent of the incoming freshmen class is technically not a baby boomer.
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World War II is as far in the past to them as the Civil War was to WWII soldiers.
Right now the start of WWII is 69 years in the past. For an 18 year soldier at the start of WWII the end of the Civil War was 74 years in the past. (OK, so I’m off by 5 years, but that’s pretty close!)
Beloit College makes up one of these every year. Here’s this year’s:
http://www.beloit.edu/publicaffairs/mindset/2011.php
Last year I told my logic students that we’d be doing some “strategery” for natural deduction. They all looked at me like I was an idiot and it occured to me that they we’re all about 11 when Will Ferrell popularized the line on SNL. That’s when I realized what a huge gap there was between my students and I. I’m old enough to have fathered almost all of the kids in my classes, the upside of which is it’s easy to establish your authority in the classroom.
Super. But you missed a really crucial one: for them, “The Phantom Menace” was the first Star Wars movie. This means that, for them, one of three possibilities holds: (1) The last three Star Wars movies are crappy and lack the shine of the first three. (2) The entire Star Wars saga is lame, thanks to Jar Jar, awful script writing, Luke screaming on his fall down the chute, and the force being a non-mysterious biological phenomenon. Or, possibly the most common: (3) They’ve never bothered to watch Star Wars. At all.
This was great, but made me feel old!
Another difference is that these kids didn’t grow up fighting over getting “Shotgun.” None of them could sit in the front seat of a car until they were 13.
One note on the gas prices – I started driving in 1995, and I distinctly remember paying $0.73 per gallon while still in high school.
Hi Leslie,
That’s a really good point on ‘shotgun’
Regarding gas prices, I checked a website on average gas prices, and it said $1.16 was the national average. It seemed a little high to me too.
I should check on that again.
I don’t really know how accurate this will, but here’s a Yahoo Answers on gas prices that purports to be drawing data from US Department of energy.
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080211085658AAgCAB7
You may have just been buying gas in an area that was below the average (and it looks like prices did dip in 1995).
Lewis,
Thanks for that link. I knew a college had done something like this, I didn’t realize Beloit was doing one every year. That’s awesome.
Their parent’s average age is 31? I was a young parent, my daughter is an incoming freshman… I just turned 42.
Sorry john,
That was worded poorly. I was thinking about the average parent age in 1990 when the child was born. Assuming that age is 31 (current average age 49) the parent is technically not a baby boomer.
I’ve fixed the wording to make that more clear.
Ah, MacGuyver. I can’t count the variety of bombs he’s taught us to create using a rubber duck, a rubber-band, and a stick of chewing gum.
And has it really been that long since Saturday Morning Cartoons went off the air? Hrm. It doesn’t seem that long ago at all; I suppose time flies.
Justin,
I thought the Saturday Morning Cartoons data seemed a little off. I think it’s because FOX may have picked up some of the slack.
They were playing some cartoons on Saturday Mornings in the late 90s. But they really started to drop off the other three networks by 95.
Also,
Part of the reason for dropping Saturday Morning cartoons on the major networks was that cartoons were readily available around the clock for lots of kids on Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon.
Those networks still played cartoons on Saturdays – so this incoming class may still remember watching cartoons on Saturday morning – it just won’t be a big event like it was in the 70s and 80s.
One important note on the cartoons. This is more of a trend with the last couple freshman classes, but most of these kids consider Power Rangers to be original, not based on Voltron and other earlier series, which they never experienced. Something I know you think is a real shame, Andy.
Ben,
That’s funny. I still use the handout about writing longer philosophy papers where I use Voltron as an example. I think I’ll be updating the example next year.
And you’re absolutely right. An overwhelming majority of students hadn’t heard of Voltron in one of my classes this semester.
That’s crazy! I watched Power Rangers growing up, but I originally was a Voltron fanatic. I guess kudos go to my older cousins.
What’s wrong with the last two seasons of MacGuyver? Having rewatched season one, I can safely say that it was weaker…
Oh, and Voltron rules. Never post before reading the other comments.
You know – maybe I’m wrong about the last two seasons. I haven’t seen them in a while, but I seem to remember things getting pretty bad toward the end.
However, I remember there being a movie that was just awful (maybe I’m conflating the two).
I also have a psychological explanation for my preference for the earlier seasons – they’re the one’s the stick most in my memory. So when I go back to MacGyver for nostalgia reasons – the earlier seasons resonate more.
So maybe I was too hasty to dismiss the last two seasons.
…and Voltron does rule.
Really interesting, Andy. I wonder if there’s some way to find out what folks were saying about us in 1996/97? I suppose it would be that we know nothing of Watergate and our parents were born well after WWII?
I had a really fun time working with my high school freshmen last year! Since I teach at a private school, many of them were born in 1992 or early 1993, having waited until they were six to start kindergarten.
Two events of note:
1) One day during crew season I gave some of the guys a ride to the boathouse. The sophomore riding shottie was amazed by the automatically retracting seatbelts in my 1992 Subaru. He had NEVER seen this before, didn’t know quite how to get in the car, and when I told him the seatbelt would move back on its own, he pressed himself back against the seat and winced like it was going to fly at him at 60 mph and wrap around his neck. When it settled peacefully into place, all of my young passengers expressed awe. This cracked me up.
2) On a more serious note, I showed them a documentary on Apartheid and they were completely appalled. About half had studied it in history class, but the other half just could not wrap their minds around it; what’s more, they were a little miffed that no one had told them about it before.
This year, my kids will have been born in 1993/94, an era that seems relatively recent to me. I should do some research and write something similar! It’s a great way to connect with them.
Most importantly, these fetuses have never seen the mid-80s holy trinity of Ghostbusters (’84), Back to the Future (’85), and Top Gun (’86). In fact, I’ve dated girls that are 24/25 and never seen these staples. That’s a negative, Ghostrider; they won’t understand you.
Erin, it is recent considering that your car is older than the incoming class!
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