Selection into higher education and subsequent religious decline in a United States cohort

Abstract

Extant research reveals an inconclusive relationship between higher education and religiosity, which might be due to the selection effect, or to the different religiosity measures used. To address this, we analyze data of a cohort of adolescents from the 1997 National Longitudinal Study of Youth to investigate the association between religion and education. First, we assess the relationship between the child's religious environment and their likelihood of attending college. Second, we investigate how college attendance and completion affect subsequent changes in religiosity as they age into young adulthood. Results suggest that adolescent religious environment significantly predicts subsequent college enrollment. Completing college is associated with subsequent decline in private religiosity index, after accounting for adolescent religious influence, peer influence, and early family formation; suggesting robustness against selection effects. Enrollment or completion of college has a complicated association with subsequent religious attendance. Fundamentalist Christians do not experience the same declines in religious attendance as other religious traditions after enrolling in college, but additional research is needed to confirm the robustness of this finding. Our study contributes to the nuanced understanding of the relationship between higher education and religion by adopting a life course perspective that reveals the heterogeneity of the relationship by religious affiliations and the socio-cultural norms associated with them.