The editor of this sainted website, Jared Gould, recently and provocatively argued that colleges are complicit in the rising frustration and rage among students indoctrinated in the fashionable wokeness of the modern academy. Case in point: the disconcerting behavior of many students who viewed Luigi Mangione, an honors Ivy League graduate and the suspected killer of a prominent healthcare CEO, as a hero despite the high likelihood that he will ultimately be sent to prison for a long period. The frustrations of modern college-educated youth may have contributed, at least marginally, to the shocking win of a radical Muslim Marxist as the Democratic candidate for mayor of New York City, and they may also be a factor in the sharp rise of reported mental health crises—and even suicides—among young people. But a longish footnote—this epistle—to Mr. Gould’s fine essay is in order.
The disaffection of contemporary, college-trained youth sometimes takes radically different forms. There is also a resurgence in very traditional values and a reduction of some well-known immoderate college behaviors. Beer drinking is down substantially, for example. Most amazing, however, there is a resurgence in church attendance on many college campuses. At my rather typical mid-quality institution, Ohio University, both a storefront Protestant church and the local Catholic church have shown robust student attendance. At the Catholic church, for example, it is not uncommon for young men to show up wearing suits and girls not only dressing conservatively but even wearing veils. The pastor confirms the numbers have exploded, and I even had my student assistant Nick show up one day at my office wearing an “OU Catholic” sweatshirt, which I think would have been unheard of a decade ago.
[RELATED: Ohio Is a Microcosm of Our Nation’s Educational Tug-of-War]
A life of addiction to cell phones and ultra-woke professorial proselytizing is not satisfying to many college students, especially since there is also growing evidence that the vaunted employment advantages of a college degree seem to be more than a bit frayed these days, with “underemployment” of recent grads a significant reality. College kids are glum from hearing from professors, DEI apparatchiks, and student affairs bureaucrats what a failure their nation and its leaders have been, how they and their families are privileged oppressors of the poor, meek and humble, etc. Is it any wonder that suicides in the United States rose 37 percent after adjusting for population growth in the first two decades of this century?
By contrast, very conservative and traditional church related schools have been booming. Brigham Young University in Utah, Idaho, and Hawaii has 80,000 or so students—over double what was enrolled 50 years ago—and has a strict honor code dictating very conservative student behavior—strict rules on student sexual involvement, no drinking allowed, etc. The Franciscan University of Steubenville, in the heart of the Rust Belt in a town whose population has declined over 50 percent since 1940, has a very conservative Catholic traditional orientation with nearly 4,000 students—triple the amount from 50 years ago—and daily mass attendance is reportedly extremely high.
A life of TikTok, heavy drinking, and light studying and class attendance in the long run is a life without a purpose for an increasing number of young Americans. Worsening things, some colleges have doubled down on becoming temples of banality, sort of mini-country clubs with lots of amenities like lazy rivers and climbing walls. Cumulatively, as the financial advantages of college attendance start to dissipate, the modern college seems less attractive, and there is seemingly increased yearning for eternal values formed over centuries and even millennia.
[RELATED: Will Georgetown Remain a Catholic University?]
One thing is for sure: for most colleges, continuing to operate with little change is almost certainly a recipe for disaster. Barring something unforeseen, such as a surge in immigration, it is likely American college enrollments in 2030 will be below 2025 or even 2010, owing partly to the effect of plummeting fertility rates. There are too many schools for the number of students. More colleges will fail, the mere threat of which may force behavioral changes that could also come from political action, such as the initiatives of the Trump Administration or many recently assertive state governments.
What behavioral changes? I am an economist, a profession that is mediocre at best at forecasting future trends. But colleges are likely to be less overwhelmingly leftist and grotesquely inefficient. To cite just two possibilities, schools might adopt institutional neutrality rules on political issues and start operating 12 instead of nine months a year, graduating students in three years, like in Europe.
Photo by Jared Gould, managing editor of Minding the Campus, taken during the Easter Vigil 2025 at Texas A&M’s St. Mary’s Catholic Center. My brother, a PhD student there, was baptized into the Catholic Church. The church was packed wall to wall with students, and countless others were baptized that night.
People keep talking about a similarity to the Civil War — I keep drawing a similarity to the American Revolution.
Diphtheria was (is) a terrible disease where a membrane grows across the throat, choking the victim to death. Circa 1763 there was a Diphtheria epidemic, which led to a Great Awakening, and the Great Awakening led to the Revolution.
I’m not Catholic — the Puritans did many things, including putting petticoats on table legs for purposes of decency (seriously) but other than wedding attire, women wearing veils (like the Latin Mass) was a pre-Vatican II Catholic thing.
Vatican II was 1962-1965 — sixty years ago.
So the 20-year-old woman of today is going to church attired as her great-grandmothers would have told their daughters to go circa 1960. This is something very different — a reaction to coming of age in an era of dramatic change and a yearning for a more stable and predictable past.
Now it may be respect for tradition, like putting running lights on spacecraft going to the moon (we did — red & green with yellow for the third side) or it may be young women rejecting two generations of feminism and yearning for what their grandmothers rejected in the ’70s and ’80s.