Editor’s note: This is part of a Deseret Magazine series examining the question: What happened to the promise of college?
America’s college-age students are facing an emotional and directional crisis. A recent Harvard Graduate School of Education study showed that nearly 3 in 5 young adults feel a lack of purpose in their lives. Half of that same group describe their mental health as being negatively impacted by “not knowing what to do with my life.” The well-documented rise in anxiety and depression in Gen Z has been linked to what a former U.S. surgeon general has called an “epidemic of loneliness and isolation.”
Many social scientists, including Robert Putnam, Jonathan Haidt, Jean Twenge and others have linked this rise in anxiety, depression and loneliness to the emergence of smartphones and social media. It is a painful irony that the most digitally connected generation in history is also the most socially isolated. But there is another concurrent trend that may be equally challenging to this generation in crisis — the rise of the religiously unaffiliated.
Social scientists have repeatedly demonstrated the moderating impact religious engagement has on loneliness, lack of purpose and emotional resilience. For example, an American Enterprise Institute survey found that millennials are dramatically more likely than baby boomers to feel lonely.
And yet that gap disappears when millennials attend church, live in a familiar community and marry. Why? It seems that these practices provide secondary spaces for gathering and support that are often lacking for nonbelievers who remain single into adulthood.
As for a sense of meaning and purpose, a large empirical analysis using the General Social Survey data shows that those who are confident in God’s existence report a higher sense of purpose than nonbelievers. This finding is consistent with many other studies, including the Harvard study referenced earlier. Both confirm that those who belong to any religion are more likely to report meaning or purpose than those who do not. Why?
Religious participants tend to find purpose in connection to deity, relationships with others and service, which are more often present in a faith community. Finally, meta-analysis of multiple peer-reviewed studies shows that religiosity is positively related to emotional resilience. Why? Religious engagement provides support structures, mentoring and value systems that help people face emotional challenges.
At a time when many young adults are turning away from religion, faith-based and faith-inclusive universities can provide the bridge to reawaken spiritual exploration, deepen a sense of purpose and provide a community of belonging.
Maintaining religious belief does not mean that the isolation, distraction and emotional challenges of modern society go away. Yet the data is clear — religion provides one of the greatest moderating influences to these crises, and there are few emergent substitutes. As a New York Times columnist recently described: “Americans haven’t found a satisfying alternative to religion. Is it any wonder the country is revisiting faith?”
Enter faith-based universities whose religious engagement offers a bridge to faith for college students at the very time they may need it most.
Despite the rise in religious disaffiliation, faith-based universities are growing. The National Center for Education Statistics shows that faith-based university enrollment is outpacing the national average. In the educational system in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, net enrollment since 2000 at Brigham Young University, BYU-Idaho and now especially BYU-Pathway has increased by over 100,000 students. Some of that growth has come through innovations in educational access. But from Notre Dame to Baylor, and Yeshiva to BYU, students want to learn in an environment that has clarity of purpose and develops the whole person.
Some of these students are simply searching for the character of conviction. For example, enrollment at Yeshiva University has been overwhelmed by students of diverse faith backgrounds. Why do they come to the nation’s preeminent Jewish university? According to school administrators, these students want to study in an environment where academic freedom doesn’t come at the expense of moral clarity. At other institutions, students want to learn in an environment that engages them spiritually.
Religion provides one of the greatest moderating influences to the crises of isolation and emotional challenge, and there are few emergent substitutes.
While many in the media are quick to highlight the growing disaffiliation from formal religion, they often fail to note that young adults also remain spiritually aspirational. A 2024 Springtide Research Institute study found that 79 percent of young adults consider themselves part of a religious or spiritual community and 46 percent engage in daily or weekly prayer. Schools that minimize or prohibit such expressions of faith deprive students of such anchoring. Another significant benefit that faith-based universities provide is a sense of belonging and community. Many young adults have grown up in an environment that feels hostile to their beliefs. Coming to a faith-based university provides a safe community of shared identity.
I admire Eboo Patel, president of Interfaith America, who has stated that there is “no pluralism without particularity.” Faith-based universities are one way of preserving pluralism by preserving the particularity of religious expression in American higher education. But this same pluralism can also be preserved when secular institutions make space for faith on their own campuses. Those of us who represent faith-based universities extend our praise and gratitude to the leaders of secular institutions who provide access and visibility to campus programs such as the Jewish Hillel, Latter-day Saint Institutes of Religion, Catholic Newman Centers and InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. These campus communities provide and bolster vital belonging that students desperately need.
This fall, a documentary entitled “HIGHERed: The Power of Faith-Inspired Learning” will launch on BYUtv. This three-part series captures the social good created by the more than 850 faith-based universities who serve over 1.8 million students. We hope others will recognize how faith can moderate feelings of isolation, a lack of direction and anxiousness that plague a generation. At a time when many young adults are turning away from religion, faith-based and faith-inclusive universities can provide the bridge to reawaken spiritual exploration, deepen a sense of purpose and provide a community of belonging that has too often been missing for a generation of college students.
This story appears in the September 2025 issue of DeseretMagazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.