Tag: parents

God’s Not Dead, Just Away at College

Jonathan Wilson

Briefly noting this item from March 2021: Contrary to conventional wisdom, having a college degree makes an American substantially more likely to say they belong to a church, synagogue, or mosque. That’s according to Gallup surveys that have tracked religious affiliation over time.

Edited chart provided by Gallup

The religious affiliation gap between college graduates and non-graduates, which didn’t exist two decades ago, appears to be widening rather than closing.

As I’ve tried to show here at Blue Book Diaries many times, the conventional wisdom about higher education’s ideological effects in the United States is profoundly broken. That is due in no small part to the work of cynical pundits and professional surrealists, many of whom were happy to receive the benefits of education at elite universities themselves.

The relationship between higher education and religious belief is complicated, but simplistic narratives about supposed religious hostility and atheism in college don’t capture the typical American student’s experience.

U.S. Adults Want Teachers Vaccinated

Jonathan Wilson

According to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in mid-February, adults in the United States have grown more concerned (since July 2020) about the effects of K-12 school closures on student academic progress. They have grown less concerned about the risk of SARS-CoV-2 spreading among students or teachers.

The risk of losing academic ground is now the leading factor cited by American adults as a determinant of whether schools should return to in-person instruction—ahead of students’ emotional wellbeing as well as pandemic transmission risks.

However, almost three in five American adults still say that K-12 school buildings should not reopen for in-person instruction until teachers have the chance to get vaccinated.

That becomes an overwhelming consensus among Black, Hispanic, Asian, and lower-income adults, as well as among Democrats, all of whom say, at least two-to-one and as much as four-to-one, that teachers should be vaccinated before K-12 schools return to in-person instruction.

In other words, statistically, the most vulnerable Americans are also the ones who most want teachers vaccinated before K-12 school buildings reopen.

You can find the news release about the report, along with links to the full data, at the Pew Research Center’s website.