Entering College Freshman Likely Never Heard a Dial-Up Modem

This year’s entering college class of 2021 doesn’t remember when a “phone” wasn’t also a video game and a research library.

Ask them about the whine of a dial-up modem, and you can likely expect a blank stare.

These are among the items in this year’s Beloit College Mindset List, the 20th such release since the list was first compiled in 1998. The List’s current subjects are the last class to be born in the 1900s—the last of the Millennials.

Other notable items on the list include:

• Their classmates could include Eddie Murphy’s Zola and Mel Gibson’s Tommy, or Jackie Evancho singing down the hall.
• Electronic signatures have always been as legally binding as the pen-on-paper kind.
• Zappos has always meant shoes on the Internet.
• By the time they entered school, laptops were outselling desktops.
• As toddlers they may have dined on some of that canned food hoarded in case of Y2K.
• Whatever the subject, there’s always been a blog for it.
• U.S. Supreme Court decisions have always been available at its website.