For this year's crop of college freshmen, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Kurt Cobainhave always been dead, women have always piloted warplanes and space shuttles, and M&Ms have never been tan.

The class of 2016 grew up in cyberspace, a factor that has increasingly influenced how today's undergraduates approach the world, authors of two recent works say.

These cultural touchstones are part of a 100-item "Mindset List," released Tuesday by Beloit College, that describes what "normal" looks like for students born in 1994. Produced annually since 1998 as a cheat sheet to help faculty avoid making outdated references, the Mindset Lists have evolved into a catalog of generational change.

In a companion guide published for the first time this year, list creators Ron Nief and Tom McBride say members of the fall 2012 entering class are addicted to all things electronic and "think nothing of texting a friend whom they know is only a block away."

Nief and McBride stress that they're drawing a portrait of the incoming class, not judging it. Still, many of their observations parallel those in a book, to be published in September, that takes a starker view.

In Generation on a Tightrope: A Portrait of Today's College Student, authors Arthur Levine and Diane Dean conclude that today's undergraduates are electronically far more sophisticated than their parents or teachers, yet woefully unprepared for the real world. The authors characterize them as coddled, entitled and dependent.

"This is a generation with an average of 241 social media friends, but they have trouble communicating in person," says Levine, president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundationand author of two previous books about college students.

The book and this year's Mindset List note the impact of the worldwide recession. Today's freshmen have "entered college with questions about jobs, whether the college degree has value," Nief says. "Their attitude toward life in America and the future is different from those of just a few years before."

The Mindset List has drawn the attention not only of educators but of police departments, military services and employers. At NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, this year's Mindset Lists will be featured in a leadership conference open to employees who span four generations.

"We want everybody to increase their awareness and understanding of what makes generations unique and different, so that we can better work together," says Gail Williams, who is coordinating the program.