College-Age Jews Are Heading South

(THIS IS THE JEWISH GROUP)

Jewish college students are going south.

Even before the Ivy League upheavals of the past two years, Jewish students had been slowly drifting away from the elite campuses of the Northeast. Now, as some seek respite from the protest movement that erupted after the Israeli response to the October 7, 2023, Hamas invasion of southern Israel, the drift has become more like—sorry—an exodus. And selective colleges outside the Northeast, sensing an intensifying disdain for Ivy League schools among Jewish teens and their parents, are tripping over one another to recruit these students.

The recent wave of anti-Israel campus activism, and accompanying incidents of anti-Semitism, have mostly taken place at a small number of hyper-selective schools. And high-school seniors have noticed. The population of Jewish undergraduates at Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, and the University of Pennsylvania shrank by 3 to 5 percent from 2023 to 2025, according to data gathered by Hillel, the national Jewish student organization. (Only Hillel tracks these numbers, because colleges generally don’t monitor religious affiliation.)

Of course, many Jewish students still apply and get admitted to the Ivies, and anyone who gets into these top colleges is still very likely to attend. But anecdotal reports suggest that a significant number of high-achieving Jewish teenagers are deciding not to apply to them at all. In Hillel’s 2024 survey of 427 Jewish parents, nearly two-thirds said that they had eliminated a college from their child’s application list because of concerns about anti-Semitism. And nearly every rabbi and professor I spoke with for this article knew students who, once admitted to an elite northeastern college, opted to go somewhere they perceived as more welcoming. Ramaz, a Modern Orthodox school in New York, usually sends more than a dozen graduates to Columbia each year. Last year, it sent zero.

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https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/08/jewish-college-ivy-league-south/684006/?gift=jcG3tmvWxz4sWOuHjwSa6_TlKWFmN5QizRaONUihick&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share