Do Universities destroy the faith of our children?

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Do Universities destroy the faith of our children?
A surprising new study suggests that is not what is happening

Tuesday, September 2, 2014
Jeff Lampl

A new study suggests this stereotype isn’t true—in fact, college might make people more likely to be religious.

“The core finding is that the association between graduating from college and religious disaffiliation has changed drastically across generations,” said Philip Schwadel, the study’s author and a professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. For people who were born in the 1920s and ’30s, the godless-college-grad stereotype is somewhat true: They were twice as likely as their uneducated peers to be religionless, not identifying with a particular church or synagogue or other religious institution.

But over time, that trend changed. “For those people who were born in the 1960s, there’s really no difference between the college-educated and the non-college-educated in terms of their likelihood of disaffiliating from religion,” Schwadel said. “And for those born in the 1970s, it’s actually the non-college-educated who are relatively likely to disaffiliate.”. . . .

Even so, these findings are important: They offer one more piece of evidence that college grads are society’s best defenders of traditional institutions. People with bachelor’s degrees are more likely to get married, more likely to marry each other, and more likely to wait until after their wedding to have babies.

They’re also more likely to live 1950s, Leave It to Beaver-esque lives. “College-educated people are joiners,” Schwadel said. “They’re more likely to participate in civic groups, to volunteer in their community. What we’re seeing is this moving into religion, too—not necessarily to hold all these different kinds of beliefs, but at least to participate in a nominal sense.”

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