The Religious and Political Composition of College Campuses

I love some fresh data and we’ve got a really good one - it’s from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). They are focused on issues concerning free speech, especially on college campuses. One of their annual activities is to field a survey of college students from around the United States.

What’s absolutely amazing about this survey is it’s humongous sample size. The total number of respondents is nearly 59,000. For this analysis, I restricted the sample to just survey participants who were between the ages of 18 and 25 years old, as that’s a decent estimate of how people think about the typical college students. That still leaves me with a sample of 52,592. FIRE was kind enough to ask a handful of questions about religious belonging and religious behavior.

Let’s start by taking a look at a question about religious attendance.

In this sample, 35% of college students reported never attending religious services. What’s interesting about that figure is that in the entire sample of adults in the Cooperative Election Study, the share who reported never attending is about 33%. So, it’s not like college students are scoring way lower on this metric than America as a whole.

In total, nearly six in ten college students reported attending church no more than once or twice year. In other words, the average college student is not making church going a regular practice. In comparison, about 17% of the sample said that they were attending religious services “about weekly” or more. It’s hard to make a direct comparison with another survey because the categories aren’t exactly the same but in the CES collected in 2023, about 26% were attending church weekly. So, it does look like college students are much less active at the top end of the religious behavior spectrum.