Good point, @Marian . I know that for my religious relatives, marrying someone of the same faith, if at all possible, is very important.
MIT, though not an Ivy, has a very large evangelical population. MIT was the largest contingent at a CRU (formerly Campus Crusade for Christ) retreat my daughter attended a few years ago for northeast colleges.
@rosered55 - I think you meant @Marian, not me.
Oops, sorry for the mistake. I’ve corrected it.
I think having active organizations like CRU or Navigators is important for social reasons. And while Fundamentalists (a subset of Evangelicals, and far from a majority) might think all institutions are liberal, most evangelicals are just looking for a place that is not hostile to their beliefs. Many universities fit this criteria.
Interesting topic. Full disclosure: I am a Christian first, and then yes, I would identify as a social and economic conservative. And I homeschool(ed) my kids. And I work as a college consultant. And I worked as a professional jazz dancer in a very liberal setting (and loved it for 30 years). And as a public school teacher.
I absolutely think Ivies and other top colleges have liberal agendas, and most of the faculty and administrators are liberal. Having said that, my eldest son attended and graduated from MIT and had an amazing time. My middle son attended UPenn for part of one semester, and is currently on a leave of absence.
Eldest was very involved in Cru at MIT, and was very involved in a local church. He also is an extreme extrovert, and had a lot of secular friends. There were challenges along the way relating to a clash of cultures, but attending MIT sharpened his faith. He had to know what he believed and why he believed, and he got challenged plenty. But as someone rightly pointed out, for whatever reason, there are a lot of Christians at MIT; however, there are very few conservatives (according to my son and his wife, both Marco Rubio type conservatives).
My middle son was involved in Penn Faith & Action (now called Christian Union), and while the leader was extraordinary in his kindness, my son didn’t really connect with others (his issue not theirs, I’m sure). I think there are even fewer social conservatives at Penn (probably a goodly amount of economic conservatives there) than at MIT.
So why don’t conservative Christians attend Ivies in higher numbers? One, it’s pretty impossible to get in. Two, I agree that many conservatives prefer a different environment. Three, a lot of conservatives I know are pretty frugal, and would never spend that kind of money (nor do they have that kind of money). Four, it can be a crushing environment when almost everyone else thinks differently than you if you don’t have a very strong support system. A good read from a sort of opposite perspective is The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner’s Semester at America’s Holiest University Paperback
by Kevin Roose.
Just worked with a conservative Christian young man who will be attending UCB, and who applied to all secular schools by necessity (very advanced in CS/STEM). He plans to be involved in a campus ministry, for sure. It will be interesting to see how it goes with him!
I knew several college/grad students involved in Cru at MIT and other Boston area universities on account of their being family friends of extended relatives who are also conservative evangelicals.
Very interesting how most of them attended and yet, complained about the “liberalism” of their respective colleges.
It got to the point some of them made it a point to keep mostly to themselves which annoyed one former post-college roommate and yes…“formerly” conservative evangelical Christian not only because of the implicit elitism* he detected from them in church/fellowship functions, but also because from his religious perspective, keeping to one’s fellow co-religionists was contrary to their beliefs to be “salt and light” in the world.
It likely played a factor in why he moved on to another church which while also being evangelical was regarded by those of his former church as being “too liberal”.
- Being superior by virtue of being their interpretation of conservative evangelicalism not only to non-conservative evangelical Christians...but even other conservative evangelical Christians who they felt are "too liberal". In many ways, no different from how most classmates at my then radical progressive LAC had the "more radical/leftier than thou" dynamic going on.
If so, why? Because secular education (science and fact-based, where freedom of thought is required and encouraged) is incompatible with most fundamental religious belief…
Fundamentalist and evangelical are not synonyms. This is just factually incorrect. It’s really very sad that so many on this thread are so very uninformed. This thread is staggering in how just straight out wrong so many posters are. Please do some research. I would like to point you to the National Council of Churches and its mission statement on social justice.
My Ivy days were 20 years ago, but I would agree that evangelicals are underrepresented. The Ivies are, despite their diversity, disproportionately Northeastern schools, and there aren’t a lot of evangelicals in the Northeast. I’d agree with thumper1 that evangelicals probably self-select and apply elsewhere. I would guess that evangelicals view the Ivies somewhat dimly, as too secular/liberal. There are some evangelical groups, such as the Christian Union, with presence at the Ivies, trying to build on the small evangelical base that is there. More power to them.
There are tons of evangelicals in the Northeast, just not as many proportionately as there are in other regions. And because the parents tend not to have gone to elitist colleges, the kids are less likely to be oriented that way.
A few anecdotes about evangelical kids I know.
One of my cousins (so . . . culturally not so dissimilar to me, although raised in suburban SoCal which is a huge difference) married a woman who is a committed evangelical. As a result, so, now is my cousin, and certainly their children. Their children were smart enough and skilled enough at the game they played to be recruited by Stanford and several Ivies; their mother absolutely forbade them to go to any secular college, or for that matter any non-secular college too far from home. She had a strong family connection to Pepperdine, where both she and my cousin had gone, and that’s where their kids wound up. (The eldest spent an unhappy year at Azusa Pacific first, in large part because her mother wasn’t sure Pepperdine was Christian enough.)
At my kids’ high school, the valedictorian tends to be pretty successful in college admissions. In my daughter’s class, the val was accepted at Stanford, MIT, and every Ivy but Princeton (early at Harvard). The next year’s val was accepted early at Stanford. In my son’s class, the val was a member of a small evangelical church, and he really didn’t want to go far from his church, or even live in a dorm. He only applied to Temple, where he was guaranteed a full-tuition scholarship, and could live at home. There’s no question he would have been admitted to Penn had he applied, and given an attractive aid package, although not likely a completely full ride. And he would not have been allowed to live at home his first year.
In general, elite colleges are not places with lots of religiously committed kids, period. There may be a lot of Jews, but there are not such a lot of orthodox Jews, and no Hasidic Jews. A couple of my friends from college are very observant orthodox Jews now, but in college one was completely nonobservant, while the other attended Shabbat services sometimes but didn’t keep kosher or observe most holidays. For the most part, you had to know someone really well to know their religious background. There were quite a few people from Christian Science families, but they didn’t walk around with that banner (and none of them at the time would have described themselves as committed Christian Scientists). When I went to law school at Stanford, I was surprised at the number of Mormons I met throughout the university, but they, too, tended not to advertise their presence.
I have a shaggy dog story I tell about a decision I made at one point in college to date more Jewish women, which I hadn’t done much since breaking up with my first girlfriend at 16. The point was, it was surprisingly hard to find unambiguously Jewish women. My attempts included a Christian Scientist with one Jewish great-grandfather, two women from ethnically Jewish families whose parents had long ago converted to something else, one family Unitarian and the other followers of Gurdjieff, a woman raised as a Jew who was engaged in a search for her Greek biological mother, and a Catholic woman who learned several years later that her mother’s family was Jewish and had rejected her mother for eloping with her father. Of course, it was easy to find Jewish women at Hillel, but the regulars there were a tiny percentage of apparently Jewish people on campus. At a time when the undergraduate student body at my university was supposedly around 25% Jewish, and the graduate student cohort almost certainly higher than that, on-campus non-High Holiday religious services rarely drew as many as 40 people, and they weren’t even that big where I went to law school.
SBJ- I question your use of the word “agenda”. MIT does not hire professors (to my knowledge) who would teach creationism in the classroom, or who would consider a debate about whether dinosaurs and humans inhabited the earth at the same time. Not because of an agenda- but because those views are incompatible with the scientific method and the facts surrounding the age of the earth and various lifeforms that exist and have existed earlier.
That doesn’t mean that someone with a strong belief in a Creator cannot teach at MIT (I have met several). But there needs to be a very sharp line between what he or she may discuss or teach in the classroom, vs. how they choose to conduct their lives, educate their own children, etc.
What do you mean by “Agenda”?
I have known a fair number of conservative Christians who have attended Ivies and top colleges. I think virtually all of them came from homes where their parents had a strong secular education and therefore did not view a mainstream (i.e. non denominational) college as a threat. If the parents were fearful of outside influences- a secular college was likely a non-starter.
I mean the agenda of shutting down certain voices on campus. Robert George and Cornell West do a better job of explaining it in their joint statement:
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/03/16/ideological-odd-couple-robert-george-and-cornel-west-issue-joint-statement-against
I agree with this, but would add maybe again, that evangelical does not necessarily mean fundamentalist. My dad was a minister and missionary, but also politically very progressive (like an actual, real-life SJW), and pro-science. Indeed he held a PhD from a very mainstream U.
And I respectfully disagree on the point of parents who are fearful of outside influences would not consider secular colleges. Just because we’re fearful (or another word choice might be concerned) doesn’t mean we don’t think a secular college might be exactly where God has called our kids. Many of my most conservative Christian friends have kids at secular colleges. We all have concerns, but we also know in Whom we trust.
I grew up evangelical and conservative, and my parents wanted me to go to Liberty or similar. I earned a scholarship somewhere else and never looked back.
@JHS That’s funny, I knew a lot of Jewish kids at Harvard. Generally Reform Jews, who didn’t do much but attend Yom Kippur services when I was there. (And occasionally invited their Gentile friends like me to come along.) All of them have gotten a lot more serious about religion once they started families.
My neighborhood has quite a few products of mixed marriages (including DH whose Mom was a Christian Scientist and whose Dad was Jewish). I remember getting a disappointed call from a woman I knew slightly who was looking for help with carpooling to Hebrew school and was disappointed that my kids were yet another family with an obvious Jewish last name who weren’t Jewish.
Harvard may not be a hotbed of evangelicals, but three of my best friends ended up being ministers. (One Lutheran, two Episcopalian.)
It’s pretty obvious to me why most college professors are liberal. They are, by nature, iconoclasts. They want to question and sometimes to disrupt the status quo. Conservatives, by definition, want to preserve it. There’s no right or wrong here. We need both types.
College students are at a developmental age where they, too, are questioning the assumptions with which they were raised. This is why so many are liberal. (Liberal in the sense of questioning social structures, not as a reaction to being raised by conservatives) But for some, perhaps half, this is simply a normal developmental phase and they will become more conservative with time and experience.
My concern is that our kids be exposed to dissenting voices on campus, and these are hard to come by, judging from the recent protests against conservative speakers. While I don’t think wingnuts and moonbats like Alex Jones need to be given a platform, more rational conservatives like Peggy Noonan and David Brooks certainly should.
I wonder whether much of the difference between being concerned and fearful might lie in the level of education/knowledge of the parents.
You are concerned about your kids beliefs, views etc., but MIT and Ivy League schools are not a mystery to you. You have been there may times you know how they function and know many people who have attended these schools who you can ask questions or discuss specific issues/concerns. So, that is much different for you than it is for a bible belt or mid-western family where no one has gone to college and they don’t even understand it locally. I think that to them, they have heard negatives about these schools, but may not have heard the counterbalancing benefits that you understand.
The genesis of the OP was really that where I grew up in a small town in Michigan that is very conservative evangelical working class and white with not many college degrees. In last year’s high school graduating class (about 100) that the two top colleges anyone was attending were Central Michigan and Western Michigan. No Ivies, no Michigan, not even Michigan State (before the Sparties attack me for the word “even”, I am one).
It struck me that the perhaps there is a greater bent against going to college away from home than I had understood. Then I thought about the fact that compared to the general population there are not a lot of conservative evangelicals at Penn. I think @sbjorlo may also have a point about it just being difficult to get in. Most of the families where I grew up put more of a priority on church related activities and learning practical hands on things. For that reason, many of them take vo-ed classes during high school. When I have tried to encourage some of them to send their kid to college they do not seem absolutely against it, but do seem skeptical about the idea.
I also realize that Conservative Evangelicals is a very broad, diverse group, and that complicates matters significantly too.
That’s a funny definition of “conservative” to use when you are talking about conservative evangelicals. While I hesitate to paint with too broad a brush, I don’t think any of them is in favor of preserving the status quo, which they view as generally godless and hostile. The ones I know believe strongly in the power of Love and Grace to perform many functions, including redemption and enrichment, but most certainly also including disrupting the status quo.