Where do students with no religion fit in college?

Where this started · University of Miami, 2022

What my dissertation found

Research on religion in college had looked almost only at religious students, while students with no religious affiliation were becoming a third or more of each entering class. I compared the two groups using the HERI-UCLA College Senior Survey: 16,148 seniors at 141 institutions. I worked from Alexander Astin’s input–environment–outcome model, with religious affiliation as the input, engagement with coursework, peers and faculty as the environment, and satisfaction and grades as the outcomes.

• Non-religious students scored significantly lower on 42 of the 50 engagement and satisfaction measures. The gaps were real but small to medium.
• They were less engaged with their courses, with other students and with faculty, and less satisfied with campus climate, social life and support services.
• Their grades were no different.
• Engagement paid off the same way for both groups: religious affiliation did little to change how engagement turned into satisfaction or grades.

In short, non-religious students started from a lower base but responded to the same things as everyone else. That makes the gap something a college can work on.

The dissertation: abstract and full text

The 2026 update

What has changed since 2022

I looked at work published from 2022 to late 2026: national polls, HERI’s Freshman Survey tables, peer-reviewed studies and data from other countries. Six things stand out.

1. The nones stopped growing, but young adults stay unaffiliated

Pew’s 2023–24 Religious Landscape Study puts religiously unaffiliated Americans at 29%: 5% atheist, 6% agnostic and 19% “nothing in particular.” That is up from 16% in 2007, but roughly flat since 2019, and no recent generation has become more religious as it aged. Among young adults the share is much higher, and the exact figure depends on who is asking.

Survey	Who	Religiously unaffiliated
Pew Religious Landscape Study, 2023–24	Ages 18–29	44%
Pew Religious Landscape Study, 2023–24	Ages 18–24	43%
Cooperative Election Study, 2023	Gen Z	42%
PRRI Census of American Religion, 2025	Ages 18–29	39%
HERI CIRP Freshman Survey, 2023*	Entering four-year students	36%
Gallup, 2025	Ages 18–29	35%
Pew Religious Landscape Study, 2023–24	All U.S. adults	29%

2. More than a third of entering students have no religion

In HERI’s 2023 Freshman Survey, 36% of 27,040 first-year students chose None (15%), Atheist (10%) or Agnostic (11%), against 22% of their first-listed parent. The share runs from 16% at non-Catholic religious colleges and 19% at Catholic colleges to 45% at public universities and 57% at private nonsectarian colleges. One caution: when I wrote the dissertation, HERI still weighted its data to represent the nation. It stopped after 2019, so these figures describe the campuses that took part, not the country.

3. There is no Gen Z revival, but the gender gap has closed

Headlines in 2025 announced young people returning to church. Gallup did find young men rating religion as more important: 42% in 2024–25, against 28% two years earlier. But PRRI, Pew and the Cooperative Election Study show young men’s affiliation flat and young women leaving. Unaffiliated women aged 18–29 went from 29% in 2013 to 40% in 2024. Barna’s rise in attendance was among people who already go to church, and a widely shared British report of a youth revival was withdrawn after the pollster found fraudulent respondents.

This matters for my own sample, which was 66% women and drawn from 2006, when young women were clearly the more religious group. A replication today would find a different gender mix among the nones.

4. Not all nones are alike, and commitment matters more than the label

At the end of my dissertation I proposed separating belief from salience, how much a worldview matters to the person who holds it, at both ends of the spectrum. New research supports that idea.

• Pew finds that U.S. nones are 17% atheist, 20% agnostic and 63% “nothing in particular.” Atheists and agnostics take part in civic life as much as religious Americans; the “nothing in particular” group does not.
• Frost, Edgell and Miller (2025) found that agnostics and the spiritual-but-not-religious report lower life satisfaction, while atheists and people who were never religious do as well as the religious. The strongest predictor was whether people feel comfort or anxiety about their worldview, and anxiety clustered among those who had left religion in the past five years.
• Ilana Horwitz (2022) found that teenagers who say God does not exist earn grades no different from the most religious teenagers. That fits the absence of a grade gap in my data.

5. The gap in the research is still open

Dyer and Erickson (2023) used Healthy Minds data on 135,344 students and found little difference in anxiety or suicidal ideation between religious and nonreligious universities. Beyond studies like that one, I found no new large multi-campus study comparing affiliated and unaffiliated students on engagement and satisfaction. The question my dissertation addressed still has few answers, while the group it describes is now about four in ten young adults.

6. Campus support is being reorganized

Since 2024, state laws and federal directives closed diversity offices at many public universities, and some interfaith centers housed in them closed too, as at the University of North Florida. As colleges rethink how they support students, these changes are also an opportunity to integrate non-religious students more fully: a non-religious voice next to the chaplains at campus ceremonies, and equal support for secular student groups.

Outside the United States

• Worldwide: the unaffiliated grew from 23% to 24% of the population between 2010 and 2020, mostly because adults raised Christian stopped identifying with a religion. Australia and Chile saw the steepest rises.
• Canada: 34.6% reported no religion in the 2021 census, up from 16.5% in 2001.
• Latin America: Latinobarómetro shows people with no religion rising from 4% in 1995 to 19% in 2024, while Catholics fell from 80% to 54%. About a third of Chileans and 23% of Colombians are now unaffiliated.
• Britain: probability surveys show no youth revival; monthly church attendance among young adults is about 6–7%.

Many Latin American nones still pray daily, nearly half in Brazil and Colombia. A student from a Latin American family who ticks “none” may be a believer without a church, which is worth remembering on campuses with many Latino students.