New Insights into College Students: The Annual Mindset List

New Insights into College Students: The Annual Mindset List

If you sell products or services to college students and teens, head’s up: The new Marist College Mindset List is out, and it offers valuable insights for your smart marketing strategy.

Previously associated with Beloit College, this is the 22nd edition of the Mindset List and the first year it has been affiliated with Marist College.

The Mindset List shares fascinating facts and findings about the incoming class of college freshmen and how they see the world.

This is the first college class born in the 21^st century. Everyone who markets to college students should study this list when crafting advertising messages and creating marketing campaigns to this demographic.

Here are a few interesting facts about today’s 18-year-olds, the college class of 2023, born in 2001:

1. Like Pearl Harbor for their grandparents, and the Kennedy assassination for their parents, 9/11 is an historical event.
2. Thumb, jump, and USB flash drives have always pushed floppy disks further into history.
3. The primary use of a phone has always been to take pictures.
4. The Tech Big Four–Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Google — are to them what the Big Three automakers were to their grandparents.
5. Their smart pens may write and record faster than they can think.
6. Nearly half of their generation is composed of people of color.
7. They are as nonjudgmental about sexual orientation as their parents were about smoking pot.
8. They have outlived iTunes.
9. Snapchat has become their social media app of choice.
10. They may well not have a younger sibling; the birth rate in the U.S. has been dropping since they were in grammar school.
11. As they crawled on the floor, TV headlines began crawling at the bottom of the TV screen.
12. Only two-thirds of this generation identify as exclusively heterosexual.
13. YouTube has become the video version of Wikipedia.
14. By their sophomore year, their generation will constitute one-quarter of the U.S. population.
15. They have grown up with Big Data and ubiquitous algorithms that know what they want before they do.
16. Most of them will rent, not buy, their textbooks.
17. They have probably all been “gaslighted” or “ghosted.”
18. There have always been “smartwatches.”
19. Blackboards have never been dumb.
20. Coke and Pepsi have always been competing in the sports hydration science marketplace.

Unless you’re 18, this list probably holds some surprises for you. If you’re selling to someone who’s 18, it’s extremely helpful to view the world through their eyes. Consider this list to create a smart marketing strategy aimed at this market. See the full list here.