Higher education, stronger faith? Challenging assumptions about college and religion

Does getting a college education tend to lead young people away from faith and towards some kind of reasoned atheism?

Walkway at Stanford University. (Image: Jason Leung / Unsplash.com)

Catholic colleges can have a positive impact on a student’s faith, but what impact does attending college have in general? Social scientists have studied and surveyed the impact, and college attendance is clearly linked to higher religiosity. There is a background assumption in America that getting a college education tends to lead you away from faith and towards some kind of reasoned atheism.

Simply put, the data no longer supports this assumption.

Professor Christian Smith of Notre Dame is one of the top scholars on religious transmission, having administered a series of surveys about religion to young people. He explains:

Most of the older research was conducted on baby boomers, for whom college did indeed seem to tend to corrode religious faith and practice. But many studies more recently have shown that the conventional wisdom about baby boomers does not apply to today’s youth. Higher education no longer seems to diminish the religion of emerging adults.

When and why did this change? Smith suggests it changed in the 1990s. “One factor seems to be a growing influence of campus–based religious and parachurch groups that provide alternative plausibility structures for sustaining religious faith and practicing in college.” Another researcher looking at a large sample of Gen Xers in 1995 noted that current college attendance was “shown to reduce the odds of apostasy” and that this effect was stronger with Catholics. Whatever the reason, the shift has happened and is notable.

In Smith’s study, the young people currently attending college were more likely to attend religious services than those who were not in college. “In short, it is not attending college that is associated with lower levels of religious practice, though those differences are slight.”

Beyond college students, Smith and others have consistently found that college graduates are more likely to go to church. The Pew Research Center frequently conducts surveys of American religious practices and attitudes. Pew’s survey shows that college graduates are 13% more likely to go to Mass weekly or more compared to those who had never attended college. Other scholars note that those raised very religious and still very religious “are more likely to have a college degree.”

But why does college attendance correlate to church attendance? It’s certainly not the liberal, secular professors nor the Title IX officers that bolster one’s faith. It may very well be that going to church is itself a sign of doing well in life. J.D. Vance has a soliloquy in his book explaining how successful people go to church and how church encourages habits that make people successful.

Ryan Burge, a mainline Protestant pastor and insightful political science professor, has written a number of things on the relationship between college attendance and religious service attendance. His website GraphsAboutReligion contains, as one might hope, some very interesting graphs about religion. He summarizes the situation:

When it comes to religious attendance in the United States, there’s basically no empirical evidence to point to the fact that education makes one less likely to attend. If anything, there’s a decent case to be made for the opposite: educated people are the most likely to report weekly religious attendance.

More recently, Burge made “this point abundantly clear: education leads to more weekly attendance. For both men and for women. Among people without a high school diploma, about 16% attend weekly. Among those with a graduate degree it’s 29% of men and 26% of women.”

In some ways, this still seems counter-intuitive to me as a graduate of two state schools. Liberal, atheist professors pushing their personal agenda at secular universities do not sound particularly likely to increase students’ faithfulness. There is obviously something more at work with the link between college attendance and religious service attendance.

Professor Burge notes the winning formula for religiosity includes college education and other expected attributes:

Religion in the United States has become a haven for those who have done everything “right”

College degree
Middle class income
Married
Children

That’s the clear and unmistakable story from the data. And it’s bad for democracy and religion.

Burge went so far as to say that religion is now a luxury good. In this regard, it’s not that college builds faith, but college is often a part of a formula for a middle or upper middle class life. Or perhaps some of the attributes that help a person graduate college–the ability to consistently get out of the door in the morning also make them more likely to get to church or have a stable income.

As a college-educated parent with a college-educated spouse, I do understand how that formula works. Perhaps this will change in the future given the high cost of college in the U.S. and its dubious economic benefits. If my kids wanted to attend a trade school (particularly a Catholic trade school) or start a business rather than go to college, I may have practical concerns, but I won’t be worried about their faith suffering as a result of not going to college.


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About J.C. Miller 4 Articles
J.C. Miller is an attorney in Michigan with five kids currently in Catholic school.

5 Comments

  1. It would make sense, then, for bishops, when they are consolidating (downsizing) parishes, erect new ones on the immediate periphery of major university campuses. Go where there are: the most people; the most educated; and where the future of the Church lies.

  2. We read: “…it’s not that college builds faith, but college is often a part of a formula for a middle or upper middle class life.”

    As a referenced baby boomer, and living on the GI Bill, as a doctoral student at a secular university in the 1970s, yours truly was fortunate enough to still live in both worlds—the academic universe of higher education (hire education?) but also in close personal and written contact with a Dominican priest fully engaged with the enduring fact of the sacramental Real Presence, plus a Jesuit (a Jesuit Catholic!) well-versed in theology and Western history.

    The DISCONNECT of secularist ideology was exposed in one sentence when, during a small student tutorial in the coffee shop (just like in the movies!), a side remark fell from the lips of the chairman of my interdisciplinary thesis (himself an anthropologist who in the 1960s had worked directly with the still-monarchy of Afghanistan to reform the educational system). Breaking abruptly from his narrative on British intrusion into India, said reflected:

    “I’m Episcopalian and my wife is Catholic, but I do not know if God talks to people….” Is God not only a cultural expression nor only an idea, but maybe a real and living God totally other than ourselves? And, yet, who also is AELF-DISCLOSING? The absolute simplicity of God who does what he is and is what He does… The Triune One…and the alarming event (!) of the Incarnation of absolute love and truth into universal human history?
    What then of the post-Enlightenment and substitute “SOCIAL SCIENCES,” whether of totally secularist Western history or pre-Christian non-Western history, or agnostic sociology and anthropology, or political science and economics? And, today, the infected inner workings of a sidelined CHURCH…which still uniquely traces back to the talking-to-people words of Scripture and to “the Word made flesh!” Through the successors of the Apostles whom He “sent” into this world…

    Now we fast forward to some intrusions into SYNODALITY, what is one to think of hireling educators in red hats eclipsing our gifted and universal natural law of interior, personal and true “listening”? Versus some other ersatz “sociological-scientific foundation”, or “stretching the grey area,” or eroding the family by blessing “irregular couples” (almost a physical metaphor for an “inverted pyramid” (c)hurch!)?

    After the past six years, are we not heartened that the gratuitous term “LGBTQ” has been expunged from the Final Report? AND, that synodal-ism is finally accountable to what in 2018 the International Theological Commission had to say about real synods as apart from focus groups: “…It is essential that, taken as a whole, the participants give a meaningful and balanced image of the local Church, reflecting different vocations, ministries, charisms, competencies, social status and geographical origin. The bishop, the successor of the apostles and shepherd of his flock who convokes and presides over the local Church synod, is called to exercise there the ministry of unity and leadership with the authority which belongs to him [!]” (“Synodality in the Life and Mission of the Church, n. 79).

    SUMMARY: Real shepherds don’t lead from behind.

  3. As many people know, survey results depend who was surveyed, how the question was framed, was it in person or remote, etc.
    The results mentioned in this article do not match what I have been reading for some time, as indicated by the quote below which I just copied from the internet, and there were others with similar results.

    “The statistics behind the problem are sobering: An estimated 80% of Catholic college students will stop practicing their faith, according to Zerrusen, who said the figure holds true for Catholic schools just as much as for secular ones.”

  4. I would encourage anyone interested in this topic to read “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010” by Charles Murray. Don’t let the unfortunate subtitle distract you. He studied only “whites” to control variables in his study. He found the same thing pointed out in the above article. Folks in the bottom economic 20% have dropped out of religious practice and people in the top 20% are much more likely to attend. Murray found that this is just another way our communities have separated along social/economic/educational class. As an aside, I often think our highly (over?) educated pastors simply can’t relate to folks from more modest education backgrounds. Just my opinion.

    • Murray also pointed out that a major reason that the lower classes have left religion, especially the Catholic Church, is that the inner city parish schools closed. Population migration out of the inner cities and the teaching orders of nuns in the inner city parochial schools, packed their bags, left teaching, and went into social work. As the Council of Baltimore forsaw, that the parochial school would be the center of parish life; it supported the role of the parents in cooperation with the pastor, to educate children of all backgrounds. Once these inner city schools closed their doors, their parishes began to empty.

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