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.

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.

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.

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.





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.



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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.