Hi, Ryan! I work as a dean and teaching faculty at a small medical school. Before that, I worked teaching nursing students. My own doctorate is from a midwestern medical school. I am not surprised by the relatively high religiosity of pre-med majors, or by the absolute religiosity dominance of aspiring nurses.
I know it sounds like a cliche, but it's really true that the major reason why people want to go into healthcare is because they want to help people, especially people who are in real danger and/or suffering. This is even more true of nursing than it is of medicine, where there are other motivators like prestige, money, and parental pressure that can lead a young adult to want to become a doctor.
I think the causal arrows here can run in a lot of ways, and are self-reinforcing. But it's going to go something like:
God says help people --> I believe in God --> so I want to go into healthcare
-or-
I want to help people --> and that's why I want to go into healthcare and also be part of a church
-or-
I want to go into healthcare --> helping people is so meaningful --> I should be part of a church so I can help people more in my spare time
Another way that this healthcare/religion selection effect becomes self-reinforcing is that religion asks you to do things that are hard, and healthcare is hard, and emotionally harder the further people go in their careers. Healthcare asks you to emotionally invest in people who you will watch suffer and die, over and over again. I honestly don't see how one could have the strength to do this without faith. Nursing students see this earlier in their educational careers than future doctors, and are generally hit harder by it over the course of their careers, too. So I think that for nurses in particular there's going to be a heavy self-selection effect for: God has called me to care for people, and God calls us to do difficult things. But I can do all things through Him who strengthens me. Additionally, among folks with more traditional views on gender roles, nursing is still a feminine profession that doesn't threaten conservative religious views on women's roles.
I think about this "helping" professions thing a lot. We have some friends who work in the social work field and so we talk a lot about the overlap between health care/ministry/social work. They have a lot more in common than many people think.
But what's fascinating to me is that some helping professions are clearly left-wing and others are more right-wing. I don't know how to make sense of that.
Bonus anecdata: Your data also didn't surprise me because of my daily experience seeing majorities of medical students with stickers on their laptops or patches on their backpacks citing Philippians 4:13, or Gospel song lyrics, or just saying "Faith," or wearing religious jewelry. Among my non-Christian students religiosity is also clear, with wearing of kippahs, headscarves, and turbans.
I love this. It really is fascinating. I'm saving it so I can come back and dig through this. My college years are long behind me but I will say that as much as I can see with this survey historically seems to be true. Just about everyone in my Nursing School dorm went to church on Sunday. I initially didn't (because I was dual enrolled and studied non stop) -until the two sisters next to me poked me to go. I went. I won't elaborate on my attendance post grad, I did however go back to church when I moved back to my home state. I would like to see that gender based survey- so yes, I dare you.
I graduated from Georgia Tech in 2025 (and now attend an evangelical seminary, so your substack is tailor-made…) and I tend to think both gender and ethnicity are playing even bigger roles in this data than what is explored in this article. I look forward to seeing how you tease this out further!
While 68K responses makes for a treasure trove of data to analyze, the organization that sponsored the survey has an agenda which they use to rank the responses. My undergrad campus scored an F, my medical alma mater was not one of the schools surveyed, despite its regional prominence and religious affiliation. My state university, where I attend the Senior Division, also got an F.
Another way to look at this survey would be to sort by A-F rankings of the survey, then see how religion, major, and political preferences shake out.
I'm always a little wary of surveys in which one response is preferable to another in the eye of the developer.
Yes -- FIRE does create a grading system about free speech based on this survey. You can certainly have ideological problems with FIRE, as well.
But how does asking 68K college students about their major and religiosity relate to that? Do you believe that those who developed the survey "one response is preferable to another" when it came answering questions about their religious attendance? If so, I would love to hear it.
I once heard a physicist say that you'll find more faith in the physics department than in the biology department because physicists are used to being absolutely certain something exists even if they can't see or prove it. He used the word 'comfortable' to describe feeling that way.
I have a physics-obsessed teen, particularly in astrophysics, and it always strikes me when he talks about a long-held physics idea & how it was eventually proven/verified. To have known that X is the only possible explanation for what they knew was happening....
I've now begun using 'comfortable' to describe the way I feel about all of the unknowns in my Christian faith. As an inquisitive person (and who on this Substack isn't?!), I would love to have answers & explanations. But I'm comfortable not having answers.
Growing up in the culture wars of evolution vs. young earth & having homeschooled in that environment for the last 18 years, who knew that science would make me more comfortable in my faith?
Thank you, Ryan, for all of your pieces. Besides feeding my inquisitive side, you've given me so many ways to think about faith, church, and my fellow humans.
Cause and effect? Take the arts majors as an example. Are the arts majors already non-religious when they arrive at college? Is that because of their family background? Or their inborn personality traits? Or do they start out as religious and artsy, and then get influenced by their peers at college to drop the religion?
It's likely meeting a more diverse group of people. It's easier to have theological feelings about people(LGBTQ+, immigrants, etc.) when you don't know any from those groups.
The focus on English majors, while consistent with the data, plays too much into stereotypes. It's natural scientists who are really hostile to Republicans and religion now, for obvious reasons. Majorities of both reject the findings of climate science, the theory of evolution and so on
Another great article (amazing about English majors) but kicking off with an Alex P. Keaton reference? Ryan, dude, you may need to update your references 😂.
I'm surprised to see Biological Sciences so near to the middle. Maybe the culture war on evolution is dying down?
When I was applying to colleges circa 2010 I remember my parents and other influential adults in my life were pressuring me away from Biology, due to strong associations with Evolution.
Note, though, that it was only ever a subset of American evangelicals who ever had gripes with evolution, not religious people overall or even Christians overall. For instance, the Catholic church has endorsed biological evolution and an old age of the universe for more than a century, and Catholic priests discovered thing like laws of genetics (Mendel) and Big Bang theory (Lemaitre). Darwin himself was trained as an Anglican pastor.
As a long veteran of the evolution wars, I also posit that a lot of American Christian anti-evolution sentiment isn't even originally about evolution per se, but about its mutant offspring (see what I did there?), social Darwinism. When William Jennings Bryan argued against the teaching of evolution in the "Scopes Monkey Trial" 100 years ago, it was in the context that "survival of the fittest" was being used as a rationale for why the USA should sterilize poor and Black people against their will, and also not have any labor laws or social welfare programs. While Rev. Bryan is probably most famous today for this fight against evolution, he's more influential for his social work, including helping to found a hospital system that's one of the largest in the Midwest today. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryan_Health) This hospital system also hosts a nursing school, wherein per today's data I'd predict most students are Christian.
Ethnicity is always interesting to explore, too! But, I thought of gender specifically in this instance because so many of the fields listed are also stereotypically gendered!
Hi, Ryan! I work as a dean and teaching faculty at a small medical school. Before that, I worked teaching nursing students. My own doctorate is from a midwestern medical school. I am not surprised by the relatively high religiosity of pre-med majors, or by the absolute religiosity dominance of aspiring nurses.
I know it sounds like a cliche, but it's really true that the major reason why people want to go into healthcare is because they want to help people, especially people who are in real danger and/or suffering. This is even more true of nursing than it is of medicine, where there are other motivators like prestige, money, and parental pressure that can lead a young adult to want to become a doctor.
I think the causal arrows here can run in a lot of ways, and are self-reinforcing. But it's going to go something like:
God says help people --> I believe in God --> so I want to go into healthcare
-or-
I want to help people --> and that's why I want to go into healthcare and also be part of a church
-or-
I want to go into healthcare --> helping people is so meaningful --> I should be part of a church so I can help people more in my spare time
Another way that this healthcare/religion selection effect becomes self-reinforcing is that religion asks you to do things that are hard, and healthcare is hard, and emotionally harder the further people go in their careers. Healthcare asks you to emotionally invest in people who you will watch suffer and die, over and over again. I honestly don't see how one could have the strength to do this without faith. Nursing students see this earlier in their educational careers than future doctors, and are generally hit harder by it over the course of their careers, too. So I think that for nurses in particular there's going to be a heavy self-selection effect for: God has called me to care for people, and God calls us to do difficult things. But I can do all things through Him who strengthens me. Additionally, among folks with more traditional views on gender roles, nursing is still a feminine profession that doesn't threaten conservative religious views on women's roles.
I have no idea what to say about finance, though.
I think about this "helping" professions thing a lot. We have some friends who work in the social work field and so we talk a lot about the overlap between health care/ministry/social work. They have a lot more in common than many people think.
But what's fascinating to me is that some helping professions are clearly left-wing and others are more right-wing. I don't know how to make sense of that.
Bonus anecdata: Your data also didn't surprise me because of my daily experience seeing majorities of medical students with stickers on their laptops or patches on their backpacks citing Philippians 4:13, or Gospel song lyrics, or just saying "Faith," or wearing religious jewelry. Among my non-Christian students religiosity is also clear, with wearing of kippahs, headscarves, and turbans.
I love this. It really is fascinating. I'm saving it so I can come back and dig through this. My college years are long behind me but I will say that as much as I can see with this survey historically seems to be true. Just about everyone in my Nursing School dorm went to church on Sunday. I initially didn't (because I was dual enrolled and studied non stop) -until the two sisters next to me poked me to go. I went. I won't elaborate on my attendance post grad, I did however go back to church when I moved back to my home state. I would like to see that gender based survey- so yes, I dare you.
Excellent article, Ryan!
I graduated from Georgia Tech in 2025 (and now attend an evangelical seminary, so your substack is tailor-made…) and I tend to think both gender and ethnicity are playing even bigger roles in this data than what is explored in this article. I look forward to seeing how you tease this out further!
While 68K responses makes for a treasure trove of data to analyze, the organization that sponsored the survey has an agenda which they use to rank the responses. My undergrad campus scored an F, my medical alma mater was not one of the schools surveyed, despite its regional prominence and religious affiliation. My state university, where I attend the Senior Division, also got an F.
Another way to look at this survey would be to sort by A-F rankings of the survey, then see how religion, major, and political preferences shake out.
I'm always a little wary of surveys in which one response is preferable to another in the eye of the developer.
Yes -- FIRE does create a grading system about free speech based on this survey. You can certainly have ideological problems with FIRE, as well.
But how does asking 68K college students about their major and religiosity relate to that? Do you believe that those who developed the survey "one response is preferable to another" when it came answering questions about their religious attendance? If so, I would love to hear it.
Do you have the way the religion question is posed? There's a bit of discussion right now on survey design on whether you as the "pick your religion from the following list" vs. a starting question of "do you have a religion". (forgive me for not being able to locate the academic paper that dives into this, news article about it in Australia: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jul/11/australia-would-not-be-majority-religious-if-census-question-changed-survey-finds)
This one is pretty standard -- "What is your present religion, if any?"
Protestant
Catholic
Mormon
Orthodox
Jewish
Muslim
Atheist
Agnostic
Nothing
Christian
Buddhist
Hindu
Other
Not directly related to the actual data....
I once heard a physicist say that you'll find more faith in the physics department than in the biology department because physicists are used to being absolutely certain something exists even if they can't see or prove it. He used the word 'comfortable' to describe feeling that way.
I have a physics-obsessed teen, particularly in astrophysics, and it always strikes me when he talks about a long-held physics idea & how it was eventually proven/verified. To have known that X is the only possible explanation for what they knew was happening....
I've now begun using 'comfortable' to describe the way I feel about all of the unknowns in my Christian faith. As an inquisitive person (and who on this Substack isn't?!), I would love to have answers & explanations. But I'm comfortable not having answers.
Growing up in the culture wars of evolution vs. young earth & having homeschooled in that environment for the last 18 years, who knew that science would make me more comfortable in my faith?
Thank you, Ryan, for all of your pieces. Besides feeding my inquisitive side, you've given me so many ways to think about faith, church, and my fellow humans.
Cause and effect? Take the arts majors as an example. Are the arts majors already non-religious when they arrive at college? Is that because of their family background? Or their inborn personality traits? Or do they start out as religious and artsy, and then get influenced by their peers at college to drop the religion?
A very long time ago, I analyzed data that tracked college students as they progressed through their studies. I wrote about it for CT:
https://www.christianitytoday.com/2020/02/students-evangelical-universities-interfaith-ideals-survey/
It's likely meeting a more diverse group of people. It's easier to have theological feelings about people(LGBTQ+, immigrants, etc.) when you don't know any from those groups.
The focus on English majors, while consistent with the data, plays too much into stereotypes. It's natural scientists who are really hostile to Republicans and religion now, for obvious reasons. Majorities of both reject the findings of climate science, the theory of evolution and so on
Another great article (amazing about English majors) but kicking off with an Alex P. Keaton reference? Ryan, dude, you may need to update your references 😂.
Also, by random co-incidence, just happened across this which is interesting and tangentially related : https://micah-baum.github.io/files/baum-endara-paulson-partisanship-2026.pdf.
He's covering the age range of his readers!
I'm surprised to see Biological Sciences so near to the middle. Maybe the culture war on evolution is dying down?
When I was applying to colleges circa 2010 I remember my parents and other influential adults in my life were pressuring me away from Biology, due to strong associations with Evolution.
Ryan (the other Ryan, not you, Ryan) has written about evolution going away as a culture war battle. See here:
https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/creationism-isnt-as-common-as-you
Note, though, that it was only ever a subset of American evangelicals who ever had gripes with evolution, not religious people overall or even Christians overall. For instance, the Catholic church has endorsed biological evolution and an old age of the universe for more than a century, and Catholic priests discovered thing like laws of genetics (Mendel) and Big Bang theory (Lemaitre). Darwin himself was trained as an Anglican pastor.
As a long veteran of the evolution wars, I also posit that a lot of American Christian anti-evolution sentiment isn't even originally about evolution per se, but about its mutant offspring (see what I did there?), social Darwinism. When William Jennings Bryan argued against the teaching of evolution in the "Scopes Monkey Trial" 100 years ago, it was in the context that "survival of the fittest" was being used as a rationale for why the USA should sterilize poor and Black people against their will, and also not have any labor laws or social welfare programs. While Rev. Bryan is probably most famous today for this fight against evolution, he's more influential for his social work, including helping to found a hospital system that's one of the largest in the Midwest today. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryan_Health) This hospital system also hosts a nursing school, wherein per today's data I'd predict most students are Christian.
How do you think gender factors into this?
Don't you do dare give me an idea for another post....
Post scheduled is November 16. And it's a banger!
Looking forward to it!
Do it!! I dare you!
I wondered how ethnicity tracked here... lol
Ethnicity is always interesting to explore, too! But, I thought of gender specifically in this instance because so many of the fields listed are also stereotypically gendered!
Fascinating.
Although, I wound up accounting-finance, but could have just as easily been English or history.