How Antisemitism Is Changing How Students Choose College

Despite a flurry of anecdotes suggesting that Jewish students and others may be fleeing Ivy League schools for colleges in the south, the data remain less than clear that this is happening.

As is always the case, data can only tell us about the past, so we’ll surely learn more next year. But I gave a talk on a related topic, “Have Antisemitism, Islamophobia and Campus Politics Changed How We Choose College?” at a conference, the OESIS Allyship Against Antisemitism at Dartmouth, based on some things that we do know. What follows is a modified and shortened form of my remarks.

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Before October 7, higher education was already in an interesting moment. From Palo Alto, Calif., to Bethesda, Md., to Lexington, Mass., where I live, people of all stripes and sorts were asking a question: will my kids need to go to college?

This wasn't something that just sprung up out of the ether. Over the past decade and change, enrollment in college declined significantly. And the percentage of high school graduates choosing to enroll in college after they graduate had also fallen.

What’s more, we’re just two years away in higher education from the demographic “cliff” that the K–12 system has been experiencing for roughly a decade now. This demographic decline in the numbers of high school graduates will particularly impact the Northeast and the Midwest. As a result, the numbers likely to be enrolled in college will probably decline even faster and farther.

This isn't a COVID thing. This isn't an October 7th thing. This is the context that higher education was entering before these events.

What’s more, the percentage of people who profess that they have confidence in higher education has fallen significantly over roughly the last decade. In 2015, over half of Americans had quite a lot or a great deal of confidence in higher education institutions. That fell to 36% by 2023, according to Gallup.

It's almost a truism to note that the confidence in higher education has collapsed significantly among Republicans. But it's not just Republicans. Independents’ confidence in higher education has gone down considerably, and even Democrats’ confidence has gone down over time.

It's not just that colleges are, “too woke.” It's also that they're too costly and too broke in many cases.

A significant number of parents and prospective students are questioning the return on investment that they get from increasingly high price tags. Many of you probably saw the article in the New York Times by Ron Lieber about the first $100,000 college, Vanderbilt University. People have taken notice. The price tags are high. And even though tuition discounting is real, the sticker price is still intimidating.

Then when you look at the outcomes, nearly 40% of students do not graduate from a four-year college within six years. Of those that do, 50% are underemployed after they graduate, which means they take a job that does not require the degree that they just earned. Of that group, well over half remain underemployed a decade later. So the outcomes for a lot of people have driven a lot of questions.

Now, obviously there are a lot of people who will look at the average of the data and say graduating college is the clearest ticket to the middle class. It's the surest ticket to socioeconomic mobility. And they're also right.

So we are all holding these disparate facts together, and it’s causing people to just ask a lot of questions and wrestle with these conflicting realities.

And then October 7th, of course, happened. I was speaking with the president of Colorado Mesa University, John Marshall, for our Future U. podcast, and he said the following:

“In the post-October 7 world, which is I think how America has looked at these college campuses, they’re increasingly saying they feel like we’re from Mars. They feel like these campuses are not really reflective of the breadth of perspectives that you see in your neighborhood, in your dinner club, in your Little League parents. I mean, wherever it is that you're socializing, you talk to people that you're friends with, you socialize with, you work with, and then you see what's happening on these college campuses and it just feels like there’s such a wide departure.”

This is on top of all of the feelings and questions that were there before.

But we should acknowledge that there's another story. Two Jews, three opinions, as it’s said.

Based on the number of students applying, selective colleges and universities—especially those that accept less than 25% of students, which is only 59 colleges in the United States—they have never been a hotter commodity.

Look at the UCLA numbers, for example. In 2000, 37,791 students applied for a class of 4,203. Just 23 years later, this past fall, the university received more than 145,000 applicants from prospective freshman for a class that will enroll roughly 6,585 students. The admit rate fell from 29% to 12%.

In 2000, Yale University received 12,887 applications for a class of 1,352 students. In fall 2023, it received 52,250 applications for a class of roughly 1,550 students. The admit rate fell from 18.3% to 4.6%.

And yet then there's this other data point. Harvard actually saw its applications drop this year. There was a 17% drop in those applying early before it rebounded somewhat and applications dropped 5% in total.

The question of course is: What caused this? Is this Jewish students turning their back on Harvard? Something else? And is it a harbinger of more things to come?

Jewish Sentiment on Campus