Gas Mentality

How do we feel about gas? For most students, we can hypothesis that they believe gas and the rising price of gas as a bad thing. But, what does this mean and why is this so? Chris and I decided to do our study on the mentality behind gas for a specific group of people, college students. Our findings were quite interesting. First, the question that sparked the idea was answered quickly and efficiently: “Do college students care enough about gas prices to drive significantly further for lower prices?” We concluded that the majority of students do not mind paying the extra money in order to save time, the reasons being college students are very busy and even if they are not busy at that exact moment, they will want to spend their down time doing more enjoyable things. But as I already stated, this was found quite simply. Other results included: people with more money are generally less likely to travel a further distance for just cheaper gas and people who live off campus use more gas. However, we did find some peculiar results when we found out that barely anyone answered one of our questions. “Rank the following gas brands from 1 to 10.” We hypothesis that the majority of students did not answer because college students (especially at Kalamazoo College) do not care about the corporate world as much as other groups of people would and they particularly do not care about gas companies. We came to this conclusion after reading a side note that one student left on the side of her paper reading, “They are corrupt and all suck.” As this is to be a short yet informative blog post, I will keep the details to a minimum. We asked the students numerous questions about their income, feelings towards current gas prices, car preferences and gas consumption in order to understand them better as a collective group. It took three tries to create a survey that was informative yet allowed students to answer the questions comfortably and truthfully. While we sought after the answer to the question, “Do college students care enough about gas prices to drive significantly further for lower prices?”, we found that our most interesting find was the lack of responses to the gas brand question. We feel that this says a lot about the college and the college student mentality overall.