College is Good for Your Faith

Prevailing wisdom is that going to college weakens your faith. That apparently held true until the 1990s. Now there has been a shift, so that going to college will more likely strengthen your faith than weaken it!

Christian Smith, from the University of Notre Dame, is the Director of their Center for the Study of Religion and Society. He has been engaged in a study of emerging adults,first when they were teenagers (published in 2005 as Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers), and now the follow-up as they became traditionally aged college students, Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults. His conclusion is that, " for contemporary emerging adults, going to college does not increase the "risk" of religious decline or apostasy as it did in the not-to-distant past. Some evidence now even suggests that it may actually decrease that risk, compared to not attending college." (p.251)

Campus Ministry critics may need to re-formulate some of their their arguments.

Additional studies:
"Losing My Religion:The Social Sources of Religious Decline in Early Adulthood"
"Religion and College Attendance: Change Among Students"