A Working Library of Seminar Topics for Instructors Building Their Own Courses.
Each topic includes a slide deck, a one or two-week plan, and a downloadable digital notebook — ready to adapt to your students, your schedule, and your standards.
Science & Society
Where empirical evidence meets values, tradeoffs, and policy. Students wrestle with data — and with what to do about it.
Can We Generate All Our Electricity from Renewables?
A data-rich investigation into wind, solar, and the path to a renewable grid. Students examine costs, capacity, global comparisons, and the social tradeoffs of large-scale energy transition.
Should We Be Using More Nuclear Power?
Among the safest energy sources per unit produced, and the cause of history's most frightening industrial accidents. Three positions rather than two, plus the MIT En-ROADS climate simulation run live in class.
Will We Have Self-Driving Cars by 2030?
General Motors promised autonomy by 1976. Students work through what the technology still can't do, then hit the questions engineering can't settle — how safe is safe enough, who gets sued when nobody was driving, and why machine error is forgiven less readily than human error.
Should We Colonize Mars?
A hundred times Earth's surface radiation, a third of its gravity, and almost no oxygen. The case for going anyway rests on an argument students rarely meet — that a species with everything in one place can be erased. The case against is mostly arithmetic.
Does Life Exist Elsewhere in the Universe?
The rare seminar with real mathematics at its centre. The Drake Equation's first terms are now backed by telescope data; the last ones cannot be estimated at all, because we have exactly one example of life. Watching students feel the evidence run out mid-equation is the point.
Are There Too Many People on the Planet?
Every generation since Malthus predicted growth would outrun the food supply, and every one was wrong — famine deaths collapsed while the population tripled. The deck's own conclusion is the sharp one: where we fall down isn't feeding ourselves, it's what we cost every other species.
Civics & Democracy
The institutions, rights, and tensions that hold a self-governing society together — and where they strain.
Should Social Media Be Censored?
Platforms are private forums outside the First Amendment, online hate has been traced to real violence, and moderation is applied inconsistently. The data supports censorship and undercuts it at the same time.
Should the US Lower the Voting Age?
The only week where students argue about their own rights, which makes it the easiest to start and the hardest to run well. In the first town that lowered the age to 16, registered teenagers turned out at four times the adult rate — and the maturity objection runs straight into the citizenship test most adults would fail.
Should the US Change Its Gun Laws?
The hardest topic to run well and the one with the most structure built in: Wednesday assigns students a side and requires them to argue it with fidelity. The polling delivers the surprise — on several specific policies, both parties agree overwhelmingly.
How Should Countries Approach Immigration?
The largest topic in the rotation, built as two sessions. Week one is global — citizenship, why countries invite migrants, and how belonging is contested from South Africa to Myanmar. Week two is American: eleven million undocumented people, and a partisan divide that did not exist forty years ago.
Ethics & Identity
Questions about what we owe each other, who we are, and how we live together across difference.
Should Sensitive Content Come with Trigger Warnings?
Most students never request them, most professors aren't sure they help, and the research suggests they may not do what they're meant to. A week built to survive past "kindness versus coddling."
Should the Sale of Kidneys Be Legalized?
Eleven Americans died waiting for a kidney yesterday, and the week refuses to let that settle anything. Four perspectives instead of two sides, and nine discussion questions engineered to break whatever position a student walked in with.
Should We Eat Less Meat?
A two-week investigation into meat consumption, production, climate impact, and ethics — held together by a storytelling-with-data lens. Students examine global data, weigh competing priorities, then build a partner visual argument.
How Forgiving Should We Be of Others?
Whether we should always forgive the people in our own lives, and how a society reckons with historical transgressions. Students read across psychology, cultural anthropology, and the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, then run a student-led Socratic discussion.
Economy & Work
Markets, labor, inequality — the economic systems that shape opportunity and constraint.
Should We Raise the Federal Minimum Wage?
Theory predicts a wage floor costs jobs. The most famous study found it didn't. Later reviews mostly side with theory, weakly. Meanwhile the data on who earns the minimum wage — and why most of them earn below it — demolishes the picture students walk in with.
Will Robots Take Over Our Jobs?
One slide quietly dismantles every alarming headline: under 5% of occupations can be fully automated, while almost every one has parts that can be. Jobs are being rebuilt from the inside rather than disappearing — and the fear itself is two centuries old.
How Should We Measure Economic Growth and Wellbeing?
GDP tracks life satisfaction well enough to be useful and badly enough to be suspect — and it climbed for thirty years while median incomes stalled. Students end the week designing an indicator of their own.
Is the American Dream Still Alive?
Fewer children out-earn their parents every decade, and young homeownership has fallen from 45% to 37%. Yet the world still wants to move here more than anywhere else, and immigrants' children out-perform native-born children from the same place. Students end by looking up their own hometown.
Education & Opportunity
Who gets taught what, who pays for it, and what a credential is actually worth — the questions students are living inside while they debate them.
How Should We Deal with College Student Debt?
The most immediately practical week in the rotation. Half is learning how the system actually works; half is one idea that reframes every forgiveness argument — the money comes from people who paid their own loans off and the majority who never went to college.
Should Colleges Use Test Scores as Admissions Criteria?
SAT scores track family income closely — an apparently decisive case against the test, until the next slide shows GPA doing the same thing. And COVID ran the experiment: score reporting collapsed hardest among the students test-optional policies were meant to help.
Is Grade Inflation Bad?
C used to be the most common college grade. Researchers compared a decade of near-identical courses and found the same test scores earning higher grades. The causes are wonderfully strange — draft deferments, students as paying customers, professors whose careers ride on evaluations. Note the question: is it bad?
Should Charter Schools Be Publicly Funded?
The evidence genuinely refuses to settle — on average charters match district schools, while individual results run from far better to far worse. It also holds the clearest example of Simpson's paradox students will ever meet, in a suspension rate that is higher overall and lower in every subgroup.
Are College Sports Programs Too Big?
A $19 billion industry where the highest-paid public employee in most states is a coach — and almost no other country does anything like it. Then the numbers turn uncomfortable: the athletes generating the revenue get scholarships, and at some wealthy programmes they graduate at strikingly low rates.
Global Affairs
The world beyond the local — power, exchange, conflict, and the ties that bind nations together.
Where Would You Rather Be Born, the USA or Denmark?
Higher incomes and lower taxes against free college, free healthcare, and a tax burden near half of GDP. A strong opening topic — opinion-driven, everyone can enter it, and a natural fit for the make-and-defend-a-claim skill.
What Is the Responsibility of Rich Countries to Poor Countries?
Two questions that must stay apart: should wealthy countries help, and does the help work? The readings stage a real disagreement between Bill Gates and economist Dambisa Moyo, who argues aid has damaged the countries it was meant to serve.
Is the World Getting Better?
Life expectancy, child mortality, extreme poverty, literacy, violence — nearly every measure of human welfare has improved sharply, and most people believe the opposite. Then the second half of the data shows what genuinely is getting worse.
A Working Reference for ASU Prep Seminar Instructors.
The seminar course isn't a content course — it's a discussion practice. Students wrestle with big questions, build evidence-based viewpoints, and learn to disagree without diminishing each other. Each topic in this library is a complete week (or two) of that practice: a slide deck of data and prompts, a structured weekly plan, and a digital notebook students use to reflect and engage.
The library is built to be remixed. Take what works for your students, your standards, your week. Adapt the notebook. Reorder the days. Add your own readings. The foundation documents — Seminar Purpose, Rules of Engagement, Sentence Stems, and Academic Integrity — should travel with every topic you choose. The rest is yours to shape.
The Four-Year Topic Rotation
Seminar topics run on a four-year rotation, so a student moving through the school meets a different set each year. The topics currently in this library are the Year 1 set, alongside a few recent topics built from other years. Years 2 through 4 will be added as their materials are prepared.
Topics marked "Year 1 · in build" have their source materials in hand — the slide deck, readings, and weekly notebook — and are being written up one at a time.
Foundation Documents
These four documents define how seminars run. Every instructor should read all four before adapting any topic.
- Seminar Purpose — what seminars should and shouldn't do
- Rules of Engagement — student and facilitator commitments
- Discussion Sentence Stems — scaffolding language for participation
- Academic Integrity — including AI-use guidelines
Slide Deck Source
The slide decks used in this library are produced by the Center for RISC at the University of Chicago and accessed through their online library. Notebooks, weekly plans, and facilitation notes are produced by ASU Prep.