Harvard Sets the Tone—And It’s Off-Key for Jews

Harvard, the nation’s oldest and most prestigious university, has long set the standard in higher education. For Jewish families, gaining admission has historically been both a symbol of merit and a source of communal pride. But Harvard has also long resisted their inclusion—first through admissions quotas in the early 20th century, and now, once again, by deliberately limiting the number of Jewish students on campus in the 21st.

Thanks to legal action and federal investigations, it is now well-known that Jewish undergraduate enrollment at Harvard declined from 25 percent to a present level of about five percent in less than 20 years, a figure that is even lower “than when Harvard had openly instituted a Jewish Quota in the 1920s” to limit the numbers of Jewish students on campus.

Harvard’s relationship with Jewish students is hardly unique among our nation’s colleges and universities. Many other schools, such as Barnard, Columbia, UCLA, and my own Sarah Lawrence College, are experiencing a decline in Jewish enrollment.

Thanks to data from Hillel International, we have a sense of how Jewish enrollment looks well beyond Harvard, and the shrinking Jewish enrollment at top schools are powerfully evident across the board.

In 2024, per the 2024 Hillel Jewish Life on Campus magazine, 55 percent of the top 118 schools Jewish students choose have Jewish populations of 10 percent or higher, and this stands in stark relief to the two percent of Jews in the nation at large.

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In a few schools, enrollment percentages of Jewish students have actually increased. At Tulane, the Jewish population increased from 27 percent to 44 percent over the past decade. Tulane has become increasingly popular for Jewish families—the school even has the nickname, “Jewlane.” Brown University in Rhode Island also saw a corresponding rise from 15 to 24 percent.

These relatively high Jewish enrollment jumps, however, should not mask large declines from a decade ago, which saw higher percentages of Jews on campuses in general. According to the 2015 Hillel Jewish Life on Campus report, 29 schools had a Jewish population of over 20 percent, and another 51 schools had a Jewish population of 10 percent or more. Just a decade ago, among the most popular schools for Jews, there was a higher density of Jewish students.

At the University of Pennsylvania, 26 percent of undergraduates were Jewish in 2015, and now that figure is down to 16 percent. In the New York region, we observe a decline in the Jewish percentage across the board. At New York University, the Jewish population is now just 10 percent, compared to 27 percent in 2015. At Barnard College, which saw violence and building occupations in the spring of 2024, the percentage of Jewish students declined from 40 percent to 26 percent. At one of New York’s flagship schools, SUNY Albany, the Jewish population declined heavily to 12 percent from 27 percent.

Jewish population drops are very real among the schools that historically appeal to Jewish students. To examine how the decline manifests outside schools that historically attract Jewish students, we can analyze 44 of the top 60 universities, as ranked by U.S. News and World Report, for which Hillel gathers and shares historical data. The missing top schools in the Hillel data include Notre Dame and others, which have almost non-existent Jewish populations, such as UC San Diego, with a two percent Jewish population, and Georgia Tech, with a three percent Jewish population, on which Hillel does not regularly report.

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Of the 44 schools surveyed, only three showed no change in the proportion of Jewish students, and just 11 saw increases, each modest, with most in the single digits. UCLA and Boston University, for example, rose by only one percentage point. The only significant gain was at Brown, which saw a nine-point increase. Meanwhile, more than half of the schools experienced declines. At the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, NYU, and Yale, Jewish enrollment fell by double digits. Even schools considered increasingly popular among Jewish students have lower percentages today than a decade ago. Emory University, for example, once estimated at 27 percent Jewish in 2015, now stands at just 18 percent. At Stanford, the numbers have remained consistently low, at 10 percent in 2015 and only eight percent today.

The question of why these declines are occurring must be explored. Given the significant demographic shifts in the non-Orthodox Jewish community over the past two decades, which include fewer young people identifying as Jewish and changes in fertility rates, there are indeed fewer Jewish applicants today than there were a few decades ago. Jewish applicants do make up a smaller proportion of the applicant pool, but why did the elite schools see especially large declines in Jewish numbers?

The answer most likely lies in the deliberate and conscious choices that elite schools are making in terms of who they want on campus. Thanks to the principles of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) and the desire to bring in full-pay students from abroad, Jewish students have most likely been unwanted and screened out. As a professor, I often find myself in rooms where we discuss collegiate governance, and I have heard stories from various deans and administrators about a long-standing desire to limit the number of Jewish students on campus. The push has clearly been effective. Regrettably and wrongly, DEI orthodoxy has cast the Jewish community as capitalist oppressors with privilege and power and the gospel of identity politics, which has captured our elite universities and pretty much all of American higher education, is one which preaches a view of fewer Jews on campus in favor of harmed, oppressed classes whose presence campus is a form of justice.

The realities of DEI and identity politics being prioritized over merit are no longer a secret, and the nation has seen the truths of this illiberal and unethical system on full display at Harvard. Rabbi David Wolpe, having served as a visiting faculty member in Harvard’s divinity school, declared that even with Harvard trying to hide its DEI heavy values and practices, the  “The system at Harvard”—like “the ideology that grips far too many of the students and faculty” and that “places Jews as oppressors”—is “itself evil.”

Similarly, Harvard Professor Omar Sultan Haque has argued that Harvard has been fully corrupted by the principles of DEI and has regrettably become a bastion of “anti-truth-seeking culture, radical left-wing bias, racial and gender discrimination, and prevailing anti-intellectualism.” When it comes to admissions, Haque declared that “there is endless evidence at Harvard, in student admissions … people are, in effect, sorted via a left-wing segregation filter: competing primarily against others of the same race and sometimes gender.” This is happening despite the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which made clear that any form of discrimination or filtering based on identity is illegal.

Harvard may be leading the charge against merit and receiving the most attention for erasing Jewish students from the campus. But Harvard is no exception. Jewish student populations are declining across many elite schools. Of the eight Ivy League schools, only Brown saw increases—among the seven others, the average drop was seven points. Jewish students are being shut out of schools around the country, and some are dealing with intense hate when they arrive. While such realities are deeply unpleasant, at least the Jewish community now has an unblemished picture of what is happening in higher education broadly and can demand that our nation’s schools of higher education live up to their values of inclusivity and diversity, welcoming and protecting those Jewish students who apply and enroll.

Image: “Harvard University” by Scarlet Sappho on Flickr