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One of the great pleasures of working in Admissions is that I’m afforded a bird’s eye view of American teenage culture. While the freshman application has changed little over time and 17-year-olds are always the same in some fundamental ways, the attitudes, values, and activities of our applicants do change quite dramatically each decade or so, heralding the arrival of a new generation. This shift has occurred again and the leading edge of this newest generation now fills all four undergraduate classes at MIT. These students are as different from us as we were from our parents’ generation. Their characteristics bode well for society as a whole, but not necessarily for MIT as it is today. Their presence will provoke a reevaluation of our purpose and mission and they will challenge all of us adults to lead them in ways we are not expecting. They will change MIT as surely as MIT will change them. And I’m not sure we’re ready for them.
The Generations:
First, by way of background, let’s consider the different generations represented at MIT today. A quick comparison of generational characteristics captures the obvious differences among them. I refer here to Rocking the Ages: The Yankelovich Report on Generational Marketing, Walker Smith and Anne Chirman, ’97, which describes four twentieth-century generations: Matures, Baby Boomers, Generation X and Millennials. (N.B.: These generalizations are meant to capture the overall characteristics of the given population, not necessarily all individuals within it.)
The first group, labeled Matures, includes the World War II generation as well as the following Silent Generation. Matures, made up of 61.8 million members born between 1909 and 1945, were affected most by the key markers of the Great Depression, the New Deal, World War II, the GI Bill. As a result, the key characteristics of this group are team work, commitment, sacrifice, discipline, financial and social conservatism. (They are also known to the following generation as "The Establishment.") Most of the senior administration at MIT is made up of Matures.
Baby Boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, are the largest single generation in US history at 77 million members. They were affected by Vietnam, TV, Woodstock, Watergate, and, of course, sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Boomers are characterized by idealism, individualism, self-improvement, high expectations and an intense self-centeredness. Most current faculty members are Boomers, as well as a little over half of all student services administrators, including the Dean of Admissions.
Generation X, born between 1965 and 1978, is the smallest population of the four at 52.4 million members. They were at the epicenter of the cultural meltdown brought about by the Baby Boomers in their effort to separate from the Matures. As a result, members of this cohort are characterized by pragmatism, diversity, entrepreneurial spirit, desire for a high quality of life, savvyness. They were most affected by AIDS, MTV, PCs, divorce, the Internet. This resourceful and resilient generation created the dot com phenomenon. Nearly half of student services administrators are Gen Xers.
Millennials, the newest generation, are the subject of this article. Born after 1979, they will nearly eclipse the Baby Boomers in size at just under 77 million members (and growing). The Yankelovich Report describes their markers as OJ, Monica Lewinsky, and multi-culturalism. I would add the Columbine shootings to that list. Key characteristics of this group are neotraditionalism, ritual, optimism, technological adeptness, volunteerism, busyness.
We can see the presence and the impact of these different generations at MIT over time in Table #1. As you know, all varsity teams and activities at MIT have been started by students. The 60% increase in varsity team offerings between 1970 and 1990 was the direct result of Title 9 which mandated gender equity in athletic offerings in public schools. The doubling of MIT clubs between 1980 and 1990 came about as a result of Gen X students who, used to finding community through common interests, created a plethora of ECAs (extracurricular activities), quite a different model of community building from their Boomer predecessors who connected through larger social movements. The doubling again of clubs and activities between 1990 and 2000 indicates the recent presence of the Millennials. Though there is no way to actually know, I would posit that the number of ECAs carried per MIT student now is higher than in years past. Millennials, as we shall see, are extremely busy people.
While I agree with the Yankelovich summary of Millennials, I’d like to share my own observations of this new generation as seen through the MIT application process, through the changing trends in the essays, activities, letters of recommendations, interview reports. I preface this with the clear understanding that I am discussing MIT applicants from the US (a specialized group to be sure). I am also generalizing like crazy, since we are now seeing just the leading edge of this amazing group, the peak number of which has just entered middle school.
Is MIT a good match for this generation?
In many ways, we are a good match for them. These kids are hard workers, carrying up to a third more courses in high school than we did at their age, so the MIT workload isn’t as big an issue to them. They can balance competing demands. MIT is the firehose. They are diverse and require diversity. You can’t find a more diverse private university in the US than MIT. They can lead or follow as required, and there are plenty of opportunities to do both here. They desire relevant work. We’re all about relevance, eschewing ivory tower. They are intensely busy. Busy is our middle name.
But in many more ways I worry about the match. First, while these Millennials are busy, they are "diverse" busy, spreading their energies over many activities, not the "focused" busy of the classic Techie, who eats, sleeps, and dreams their passion. They desire structure when we are all about choice. They don’t consider "choice" to be a value as the Boomers and Gen Xers do. These kids were raised on the World Wide Web and 90 channels of cable. They do not need 30+ choices of living groups – they are busy…they just want a room. You can see the evidence for this attitude in Table #2, the chart listing the top reasons why admitted MIT applicants chose to enroll elsewhere. Last year, for the first time, housing and the quality of the campus, was the #3 reason why the students we worked so hard to admit went to other schools. This year, the quality of student life, which includes housing and campus issues, was #2 on that list. This generation is voting with its feet. The current housing system with its myriad choices and arcane rules, an artefact of the Boomer era, is no longer relevant to the students of today. MIT housing is changing just in time.
Most disturbing to me, though, is that the MIT Millennials, who have been raised on praise and positive re-enforcement, are in for real culture shock. They have been groomed to high achievement, feted by their schools and communities, have starred in USA Today as well as in their local papers, have been cheered in their games by adults from both sides. They have nearly all earned at least state level distinction in something. Think about that for a second. What would it have taken to be the state’s best something when you were their age? It is a big deal and they could not have gotten that far without positive support from the adults in their lives. As we all know, there is very little of this at MIT, for any of us. These students come to MIT, ready for us to lead them and position them for the next logical progression of their lives and they quickly disengage from us because we do not recognize their specialness. These are not Boomers or Gen Xers who reacted to this phenomenon by angrily pushing MIT faculty and administrators away and creating their own islands of support. These students wonder why we glorify the Big Screw Award, why the only campus-wide community sentiment is IHTFP, why we tolerate the Tech Is Hell lifestyle. They wonder why they turned down Stanford to come here.
Why should we care or try to change?
It is no surprise that I am writing this as Dean of Admissions. Many faculty who have worked with the Admissions staff and with CUAFA know well that we are in a tough period in college admissions. Our competition (Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Yale) is actively recruiting our kind of students – Techies – at a time when these students’ portfolios are now so balanced they are just as attractive to liberal arts schools as they are to us. And everywhere universities are buying top talent. In short, we now have to work aggressively just to continue to hold our base. To make things worse, Millennials require a sense of the larger community that can readily be found at our competitor schools. MIT, with its focus on the individual, without a sense of campus-wide community, looks pale in comparison, like an outlier, to these kids. MIT will need to adapt in some ways if we are to continue to enroll the best students of our type in the world.
What they need from us
Millennials need MIT. Despite their good qualities, and there are many, these stunning young people need to learn to think analytically and to question more. They need a sense of context to help them sort through the dizzying mass of information they confuse for knowledge. And closer to this Boomer’s heart, they need to realize that actions have consequences, so that in the future they will be less likely to hand over their privacy – and ours – for the sake of efficient consumer service. (They don’t call these kids "the Abercrombie generation" for nothing.)
Whether we acknowledge it or not, we adults at MIT do act "in loco parentis," playing a major role in the lives of our students. Just as we expect them to meet our needs regarding deadlines, class participation, attention to detail, etc., they need specific things from us in order to thrive here.
From my point of view, the future looks bright. If we assume our natural role as the wise elders of this community during their tenure at MIT, and if we apprentice them well, the world will be in good hands with these Millennials. Not only will this huge population of very hard workers who care about community do good things in their lives, they will never let Social Security fail. And that should help us all sleep a lot better tonight.
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