What Does Religion Look Like At Elite Universities?
(ANALYSIS) I think people vastly overestimate the unbelievable inequalities in higher education in the United States today.
I would hazard a guess that if someone asked a human being on planet earth to name the best college in the world, a large share would say Harvard. Here’s what may be contributing to its vaunted status: Harvard is sitting on an ocean of money.
How much?
In fiscal year 2024, it was $53.2 billion. Its endowment has grown by at least $10 billion since 2021. The Wall Street Journal described Harvard as “a hedge fund that has a university” back in 2017.
What really grinds my gears about Harvard (and others in that stratosphere) is that rich people still write checks to their endowment. Malcolm Gladwell did a podcast episode on this phenomenon and titled it, “My Little Hundred Million.”
If you write a nine-figure check to Harvard, they just throw it on the pile. At a place like Eastern Illinois University, it would absolutely change everything. Our endowment sits at $5.5 million.
The student body at Harvard is not at all like the composition of my classroom. Harvard’s legacy admissions rate is 33%, compared to 6% for nonlegacy applicants. In contrast, at EIU, our motto is “y’all come.” I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone describe themselves as an EIU legacy.
My guess is that Harvard’s share of first-generation college students is a bit lower than my institution. But I wanted to push beyond simple socioeconomic status. What about the religious composition of elite universities versus regional comprehensives.
Using FIRE’s (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) recent survey of a bunch of college and university students, let me show you the religious composition of Harvard and Yale, compared to Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville, which is the epitome of a directional university in a flyover state.
There are some pretty big differences when looking at this data. The first is that Harvard/Yale have a whole lot fewer Protestants — just 25% of the student body, compared to 38% at SIU-E.
So, that’s about 13 points that Harvard/Yale need to find somewhere else. A big chunk is in the difference in Catholic students — you are twice as likely to encounter one at these Ivy League schools than at SIU-E (18% vs 9%).
The rest of this is due to there being a whole lot more Jews, Hindus and Muslims at Harvard. Which does make sense from the perspective of regions. There are larger concentrations of Catholics in the Northeast, and huge pockets of folks who come from non-Christian backgrounds.
However, what really struck me was the nonreligious share. At Harvard and Yale, the percentage of the student body who identified as atheist or agnostic was 28%. It was the exact same share of students who were attending Southern Illinois University - Edwardsville. And, the percentage who claimed no religion in particular was almost exactly the same in both (17% vs 15%).
It’s pretty noteworthy that there aren’t more nones at elite Ivy League institutions. But is this just a quirk of choosing these three institutions to make this comparison?
To read the rest of Ryan Burge’s column, please visit his Substack page.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.