There’s an interesting report at Inside Higher Ed today on a study of religiosity and college. Some of the results will probably come as a surprise to many people around ScienceBlogs:
# The odds of going to college increase for high school students who attend religious services more frequently or who view religion as more important in their lives. The researchers speculate that there may be a “nagging theory” in which fellow churchgoers encourage the students to attend college.
# Being a humanities or a social science major has a statistically significant negative effect on religiosity — measured by either religious attendance and how important students consider the importance of religion in their lives. The impact appears to be strongest in the social sciences.
# Students in education and business show an increase in religiosity over their time at college.
# Majoring in the biological or physical sciences does not affect religious attendance of students, but majoring in the physical sciences does negatively relate to the way students view the importance of religion in their lives.
I suppose this probably counts as evidence of a giant failure in our academic system. After all, if they were being taught science properly, they’d all be atheists by graduation…
(The odd jumble of findings leads me to suspect that this is another of those odd consequences of using statistical significance as a threshold for reporting. It would not surprise me to learn that majoring in biological or physical sciences leads to a decrease in church attendance that has a 5.2% chance of being accidental. I’m not about to pay for the PDF to check, though.)