The College Fix

This is an interesting flip of the conventional wisdom that a college education drives people away from religion.

Research by Philip Schwadel, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, finds that the “least-educated members of Generation X — people born roughly between 1965 and 1980” – are “most likely to leave religion,” Religion News Service reports.

It’s too soon to measure the effect of education on religious adherence for millennials, those 18 to 30, the professor said, but the trend has been steadily shifting since the Coolidge administration:

“Americans born in the late 1920s and ‘30s who graduated from college were twice as likely to drop out of religion than people who didn’t graduate from college,” he said. The postwar baby boomers proved to be “the last holdout of the church dropouts.” For boomers, “a college degree was still associated with a higher likelihood of leaving religion.”

However, for the generation born in the 1960s, there’s no difference between those who did and those who did not go to college in their likelihood of religious affiliation. Now, for America’s middle-aged adults who were born in the 1970s, “those without a college education are the most likely to drop out.”

Schwadel speculates on the causes of this shift: more “opportunity for religious connection” on campus, secularization’s loss of “elitism,” and the increasing number of college-educated people in churches, which could make less-educated people “uncomfortable” in the pews.

Read the full article here.

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