The Religion and Politics of Students Who Were Homeschooled
Are they more religious? Are they more conservative?
I went to a fairy conservative Southern Baptist Church in rural Illinois as a kid. It was a big congregation - I bet we had 300 in worship on an average Sunday when I was a teenager. We also had a pretty robust youth group, which looking back on it now, was the center of my social life. I spent more time with those kids than I did any other group at school. Church camp, lock-ins, and mid-week youth group was just a regular routine for me at that time. Most of the youth group were people I went to high school or grade school with, but there were a significant number of kids who didn’t go to school at all - they were homeschooled.
The best way that I would describe these homeschooled kids was a slightly toned down version of the Duggars of 19 Kids and Counting fame. There were two pretty prominent families in First Baptist Church that each had five children. I knew from my interactions with them that they took their faith very seriously and they also were incredibly conservative. And yes, I know the stereotype is that homeschooled kids are socially awkward. In my experience that was generally (but not universally) the case.
It’s a population group that I’ve always wanted to try and understand better, but it’s a super hard methodological problem. There’s no central database that tracks them. The best estimates range from 1.9 to 2.7 million homeschooled kids in the United States. For comparison, there are nearly 50 million kids in public schools nationwide. The best data that I’ve come across is from FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), which does an annual survey of college students. So this isn’t a representative sample of all kids who were homeschooled. It’s homeschooled kids who went to college.
Before I zoom in on the homeschooled respondents, let me show you the schools with the highest percentage of students who did not attend a public school in this data.
The total sample FIRE collected was nearly 59,000 students spread across 257 universities. In that data there were a total of 1,350 students who reported that they had been homeschooled or 2.3%, but there were quite a bit more students in the sample who either reported that they attended a private school or a parochial high school. The one that clearly leads the way here is Hillsdale College. New Yorker magazine described it as, “The Christian Liberal-Arts School at the Heart of the Culture Wars. “It’s become an example among political conservatives of how higher education should happen. It also, apparently, attracts a whole bunch of homeschooled kids. It has, by a very large margin, the highest concentration of kids who do not have a formal education in a public or private school system.
There are some others on the list who have a decent concentration of homeschooled kids, but considering I only have about 1350 students in the entire sample, once you spread that across 250+ schools you don’t have many in each. What I can say is that a lot of schools tend to be a haven for kids who went to private schools. That was the case for half of Notre Dame’s student body. But I was surprised to see that only about a third of their students went to parochial schools.
I think we can make a broad generalization here - a lot of elite colleges are made up of kids who went to private or parochial high schools. Places like Wesleyan, Williams, Amherst, Dartmouth, Barnard, and Kenyon College. I am going to bet that a lot of these are kids who come from fairly well off families in the northeast. I don’t see many students like that in the classrooms of Eastern Illinois University.
But let me circle back to the topic of this post - trying to figure out if young people who were homeschooled have a different religious and political composition than college students who went to a public or private high school. Let’s look at religious attendance first.
For college students who went to a public high school, just 16% report weekly religious attendance compared to 38% who say that they never attend and another 11% who report seldom attendance. Think about that for a second - half of public school kids attend church less than once a year. And that’s true across the other types of public schools, too (charter and magnet). It’s also really notable that private schooled kids don’t look at all different from public school students when it comes to religious attendance.
There are two groups here that clearly stand out. Among college students who went to a parochial school, religious attendance is higher. Among this group, 27% said that they were weekly attenders and another 14% said that they made it to a house of worship at least once a month. In comparison, only 19% were never attenders and 9% attended seldom. For homeschoolers, attendance was even higher than that. A third were in church weekly and 12% attended monthly. Just a quarter never attended and 9% attended seldom. It’s apparent to me that homeschooled kids were the most religiously active of any of these groups, followed closely by the parochial school students.
Now, let’s look at religious composition.
Given what we just saw when it came to religious attendance, I was pretty stunned to see how little the differences were in the sample among public school students and those who attended private or parochial schools. In each case, the share of Protestants was almost exactly the same - averaging between 23% and 28%. Now, when it comes to Catholic identity, parochial students clearly stand out here. About 36% of them said that they were Catholic, which makes sense. Among public school kids, 45% were non-religious. About half of kids who went to a public charter or magnet school. However, among the parochial school kids, only 25% were nones compared to 39% of those who attended private school.
Again, the homeschooled part of the sample stands apart from the rest. According to this data from FIRE, about 45% of them were Protestant - nearly double the average from the rest of the sample. And, only about a quarter were non-religious, compared to 43% of the entire sample. The takeaway from this graph is that Catholic kids who don’t want to go to public school go to a parochial school. For Protestants, they tend to homeschool.
But what about college students' politics based on how they went to high school? I visualized where each group landed on matters of political partisanship and political ideology in the scatter plot below.
The most left leaning group here is undoubtedly kids who attended a public magnet school. They were both the most liberal and Democratic-leaning. Then, there’s a pretty tight cluster of three types of students: private, public, and public charter. They were slightly less liberal and less Democratic than those who went to a public magnet school. But these groups were clearly left of center, too.
Then there are two groups that are off to themselves in the top right of this graph - those who went to parochial school and those who were homeschooled. The parochial school kids were slightly to the left of center on both metrics. The homeschooled kids were very slightly to the right. But you need to consider the scale of both axes here. These homeschooled kids are almost exactly in the dead center of both of these scales. The average homeschooled respondent was independent when it came to partisanship and middle of the road on political ideology. I don’t see any evidence that they are far right.
But let me give you another look at that - this is just the political ideology of the sample broken down by what type of high school they attended. I restricted it to Christians, though. Because comparing homeschooled kids (who are 26% nones) with public school kids (who are 45% nones) is just apples and oranges. Let’s control for religion and then look at politics.
Here’s what could be overlooked in this chart - not a lot of Christian college students describe themselves as very liberal. It’s less than 10% of them. Which is about the same share who identify as very conservative (11%). If a college student is a Christian, 38% identify as liberal and 40% identify as conservative. In the entire sample, 56% of college students are liberal while 25% are conservative.
Once you restrict the sample to Christians, the political ideology of each of these groups doesn’t really change that much. The big thing that stands out to me are the public magnet kids. They are clearly further left of center - about 55% say that they are liberal compared to about 25% who are conservative. But then the parochial school kids lean the other way. 46% are conservative and only 32% are liberal.
The Christian homeschooled kids are slightly to the right of the Christian parochial school students. About 54% of the homeschooled students say that they are conservative (and 20% say that they are very conservative). There are some who put themselves on the left side of the continuum, though. 31% of Christian homeschoolers said they were liberal. I don’t know if I’ve met a whole lot of this group, though. They don’t seem to be very loud about these positions.
I think these findings generally support the stereotypes about folks who were homeschooled. They do tend to be more religious than their peers who went to a public school and they are a whole lot more likely to be Protestant - the data is unequivocal on this point. But when it comes to politics, they are more right leaning than public school students. But they honestly look a lot like students who went to parochial schools. That’s what I’ve learned from this - a student going to a Catholic high school isn’t really that different ideologically than a young person who was homeschooled.
So, are homeschooled students far from their peers? I guess it depends on what you consider to be the “control group.”
Code for this post can be found here.
Love this post. Would love to view the racial breakdown. My wife and I are African American, Christian, and chose to homeschool our four kids (all adults now) for non-religious reasons. If I had to place them, from a political standpoint, I would say 1 is conservative, 2 are progressive, and the youngest “couldn’t care less” lol. From a social standpoint, they are all, for the most part, fairly well adjusted. One suffers from anxiety, so they have a small circle of friends. They all have their quirks, which I believe is a byproduct of homeschooling, but otherwise they are all pretty “normal”.
So it would be interesting to see the views of kids who WERE homeschooled and then grew up. Many of us who were sheltered homeschoolers in the 90s would have told you we were conservative and religious in our 20s but now in our 40s many of our views have changed and become our own.