There’s an interesting story about college kids and religiosity in today’s Inside Higher Ed: God and Majors.Many parents worry that college will drive religion out of their kids. Does it?
A new national study that looks at trends between study of certain subjects and religious observance provides some evidence to back up those worries, but also may surprise members of some disciplines and some faiths. And the research also finds that religious students are more likely than others to attend college….
Among the findings:
• [1] The odds of going to college increase for high school students who attend religious services more frequently or who view religion as more important in their lives….
• [2] Being a humanities or a social science major has a statistically significant negative effect on religiosity…. …The impact appears to be strongest in the social sciences.
• [3] Students in education and business show an increase in religiosity over their time at college.
• [4] Majoring in the biological or physical sciences does not affect religious attendance of students, but majoring in the physical sciences does negatively relate to the way students view the importance of religion in their lives.
• [5] Religious attendance is positively associated with staying in majors in the social sciences, biological sciences and business majors. For most vocational majors, the researchers found a negative relationship between religious attendance and staying in the same major….
…The study’s authors were interested in exploring whether a “scientific mindset” discouraged religiosity:
"Our results are … consistent with [that] overall theoretical framework guiding this research. We believe that there are important differences among the college majors in world views and overall philosophies of life....," they write.
"[O]ur results suggest that postmodernism, rather than science, is the bête noir – the strongest antagonist – of religiosity."
Some of these findings (as reported) are a bit perplexing, but I’m sure nobody’s surprised by indications that humanities and social science majors are negatively influenced concerning their religiosity.
I’m not at all surprised that education and business majors tend to move towards (or more deeply into) religion. I bet they go to chiropractors and read horoscopes, too.
They (i.e., people with education degrees) are in charge of K-12 education, you know. Our K-12 education system is a disaster you know.
Just sayin'.
That fourth "finding" is interesting. Of course, if most science majors are irreligious at the outset, we shouldn't be surprised that their college years won't change their church attendance. I would expect most college students (in demanding fields) to increase in sophistication and understanding of their irreligiousness, which is consistent with this "finding."
The fifth "finding" is curious. Does this refer to students who choose a major and stick with it? I would expect religious students to be more likely to do that, owing to their, um, faith-based thinking. It's harder, I would think, to decide what to do with one's life if one proceeds without the comfort and inertial intellectual infrastructure of a theistic world view.
Do you suppose there's good data on this?
5 comments:
Regarding the "education and business majors" moving towards religion, I wonder if that's due in part to the disproportionately high number of education and business majors in religious colleges -- they certainly don't have large evolutionary biology departments.
This one is interesting. Like the previous post, I'd like to know which colleges were sampled, how large the sample was, and how it would compare in relation to other eras.
What seems most fun to me is a sense of irony in the findings as they relate to recent media perspectives.
"Education", when described by conservative media outlets such as Fox News, is always seen as a bastion of liberal bias. But if education majors are high on the religiosity scale, and we can then assume that they then enter the field of education as a vocation, wouldn't that mean that "Education" is likely to be a breeding ground for the arch-conservative Religious Right?
I love this Blog. In the spirit of Chunk's efforts, opposing viewpoints are welcome. I'd love to hear what others think of the study, and the realities seen by those in the trenches.
(1) 5:54, the report does not indicate that education majors (or graduates) are mostly religious. Rather, it says that they trend toward religiosity in the course of their studies. That's consistent with few education majors (initially) being religious--and thus few ending up religious, despite the trend toward religiosity. No doubt the relevant data is available. Mostly, the study discussed here emphasized influence. That ed majors trend toward greater religiosity indicates that it teaches littler or nothing to discourage "faith" and the like. Since the physical sciences expressly reject belief-without-evidence, one would expect, there, that religiosity goes down or that existing states of religiosity take on the rhetoric of "testability," "falsifiability," and verification (i.e., they grow in sophistication). The data (as described) is therefore surprising.
(2) Go to the Inside Higher Ed article to read more about colleges sampled. The study can be found here.
(3) 5:16, I would like verification of the factoid to which you refer: that "disproportionately high number of education and business majors [are] in religious colleges." If that is true, it is truly fascinating. Be sure, though, to distinguish between these two very different propositions:
1. At religious colleges, most students are education or business majors
AND
2. Most education or business majors can be found at religious colleges.
I took you to be saying 1, not 2. I would think that most people who receive education degrees come from non-religious colleges, since the latter educate more students by far (I think).
As 5:54...
Thanks for the feedback on my original post.
I DID miss the nuance distinguishing the term Religiosity - I presumed that it referred to the mass of humanity that might be religious, and glossed over the fact that the term referred to the extent of religious belief a student entered and exited with.
Maybe I should not be reading this blog at 5:54, and get my cup of coffee before I attempt to engage my brain.
My bad. Thanks for the correction.
Always drink your coffee before visiting DISSENT.
Being a UCI student has its benefits, I got the paper for free just by giving them my e-mail address.
The data is collected from some ancient (1975!) on-going study, Monitoring the Future (MTF [monitoringthefuture.org]). Every year since 1976 they they "...interview 16,000 high school seniors in the US using a multistage sampling strategy..."
It "... includes students that attend both public and private schools..."
Never having taken a statistics class (I know!) I can't say I understand some of their analysis techniques. If I read correctly they give out a questionnaire to the students they interviewed, and the data received from a select 5 questions (circle your answer!) are examined to determine how religious you are as a senior in high school (this is their baseline). Over the subsequent years the participants are queried again, and again and their changes are examined. So amongst all the data they are collecting they have a few questions about religion and a few about education. Using some "Latent Growth Curve Analysis" they are able to examine the effect of major on religiosity, and the effect of religiosity on major (actually, they don't use LGC analysis here).
So, as you can imagine, there is the question of religion's effect on your college major, and then your college major's effect on your religion.
Though, I guess we're only interested in the effect of a major on the religiosity at this juncture. Here, the thing that surprises me is that amidst a bunch of irrelevant data, they are able to extrapolate a sort of cause-effect relationship out of two sets of questions which say nothing about each other. Go statistics? Though, my skimmed reading suggested that all these effects were predicted and correlate with other studies studying the same/similar thing. However, I feel that the quality of such data is sort of out of my range of judgment, so I can't really say how I feel about it.
Personal Story Time:
With regards to my personal experience pertaining to the business phenomena: In my own family at least, the people who are taking business major route are the people who have no direction in life, no innate desire for anything other than wasting time. They aren't religious persay, but they are very open to the idea. They give much credence to discussions pertaining the God, and shun science as some enigma not meant to be understood by the normal mind (as such I am the only science major in my family in all the history we have recorded). They believe in God, but "not in the typical Christian view" In my experience this person is swept up easily by shallow invites to church where they are immersed in a community that welcomes them, parties hard, and is typically supportive of every thing so long as you are one of them.
With regards to my own personal experience, at IVC anyways, out of the few physics students who would call themselves physicists (3 total) one was a very new-agey guy who often tried to explain his beliefs with physics. He would often confuse words like energy with new age mumbo-jumbo, and boy, he sure did love "the light." But I don't think he was talking about electromagnetic waves. I'm certain that as he gets older, he will either throw those beliefs away, or throw Physics away, or more likely rationalize some medium ground.
The other guy was an atheistic asshole who had a hard on for plasma.
The third guy was this charming long haired-goateed agnostic (in the dictionary sense of the word) nerd who often joked about Star Trek and had heated debates about the geometry of length contraction at relativistic speeds. He, oddly, knew too much about Einstein and Bohr and his professor looked to him for verification of facts on various dead white guys. Boy, he sure did love those dead white guys.
- loves dead white guys BS
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