{"id":1500,"date":"2007-06-14T09:27:18","date_gmt":"2007-06-14T09:27:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2007\/06\/14\/college-makes-students-more-re\/"},"modified":"2007-06-14T09:27:18","modified_gmt":"2007-06-14T09:27:18","slug":"college-makes-students-more-re","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2007\/06\/14\/college-makes-students-more-re\/","title":{"rendered":"College Makes Students More Religious"},"content":{"rendered":"

According to Inside Higher Ed<\/cite>, that’s what sociologists found when analyzing data from a longitudinal study of more than 10,000 young Americans. Those who went to college were more likely to remain religious<\/a> than those who didn’t attend college, with 76% of the non-college group reporting a decline in attending religious services, compared to only 59% of those who attended college. As one of the authors notes, this goes against conventional wisdom:<\/p>\n

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“Actually we’ve just been wrong about this for quite a while,” said Mark D. Regnerus, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin and one of the authors of a new study that suggests students who attend and graduate from college are more likely than others to hold on to their faith.<\/p>\n

It’s not that colleges necessarily encourage faith, he said, but for all the talk about how intellectuals are out to destroy students’ relationships to their religions and God, the main obstacles to such relationships have to do with maturing and how young people spend their time. “Some kids were bound to lose [their faith] anyway and they do,” Regnerus said. But the evidence suggests that college isn’t responsible.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

They do have some findings about factors that reliably push students away from religion, though:<\/p>\n

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Behavioral factors, he said, are a better way than college status to predict whether young adults will become less religious. Those who don’t have sex before marriage are also those who don’t experience as much of a drop in religious connection. Those who have smoked pot experience more of a drop. Those who increase alcohol consumption during their young adulthood experience more of a drop in religious connection.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Clearly, militant atheists need to spend less time on education, and more time on the critical task of getting college students stoned and laid. Woo! Par-tay!<\/p>\n

Kidding aside, there are a whole bunch of factors that could be at work here that might provide alternative explanations for the results. Many of these are probably addressed in the actual study, but I don’t have access to that so I can’t check, but here’s a partial list of suggestions:<\/p>\n