Posts created by students in SOC 101 during the Fall 2022 semester.
Colleges with need-blind admissions policies present this approach as a great equalizer for lower-income students in higher education. Under this system, colleges and universities promise to not factor in a student’s ability to pay tuition when considering admissions, acting as if they are “blind” to a student’s need. Roughly 100 U.S. colleges and universities currently […]
Hockey is one of the most expensive youth sports in North America. Even before a child begins playing, families must pay for equipment, ice time, and sometimes travel teams. Research shows that these costs add up quickly and put considerable pressure on families, turning hockey from a fun activity into a long-term financial commitment that […]
The fast-paced evolution of artificial intelligence has led to an exponential growth in data centers. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are building their data centers at an accelerated pace, causing emissions from fossil fuel usage to increase to alarming levels (Grochulska-Salak et al. 2025). With increasing reliance on artificial intelligence, data centers will continue to consume […]
When I returned home from college in the summer in 2025, I was met with a completely different version of my hometown than the one I left. Gone were the expanses of open farmland and cornfields that had once defined Wooster, Ohio. In their place stood new mid-priced, high-density housing developments and large grocery store […]
The birth rate for teenagers (ages 15-19) has been steadily decreasing since the 1990s. While in 1991, the birth rate was about 62 per 1,000 women, by 2023 it had dropped to 13 per 1,000 women (Statistica 2023). Despite this sharp decline, the teen pregnancy rate is much higher than in other developed countries such […]
Despite my love of making crafts for my friends and family, I often feel hesitant to share my love of sewing. For many non-sewers, sewing evokes the image of a 1950s housewife and homemaker, making interest in the craft seem like a nostalgic return to a more restrictive past for women. Yet, interest in sewing […]
Gun violence is the leading cause of death for children under the age of nineteen in the United States (Rencken et al. 2025). In America, twenty-five percent of mass shootings happen in schools (Nassauer 2025) and continue to increase unabated (Capellan and Gomez 2018). Mass public shootings in the United States from 1984 to 2015 […]
“A case was referred to us in which a boy – just fourteen years old – was badly beaten and robbed. The young man who did it was facing three years in prison. I went to speak with the survivor’s mother…she said to me: When I first found out about this, I wanted that young […]
Global companies have long profited off Congo’s resources with the help of wealthy nations, to the detriment of Congolese people. The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is one of the richest countries in natural resources but ironically happens to be one of the poorest countries in the world (Kara 2022). How the Demand for Cobalt […]
When Congress approved the Federal-Aid Highway Act in 1956, it authorized what was the largest public works program in U.S. history. It was used to build 41,000 miles of highways that connected 42 capital cities, as well as ninety percent of US cities with populations greater than 50,000 (Knight 2007). It sought to enhance travel […]
