In a viral video, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy warns his teenage daughter against enrolling in Harvard University, telling her the school has “professionalized figuring out how they can take good young girls like you and, I think, corrupt their minds.”

The conversation, clipped from a reality TV show about the Duffy family, is reflective of a wider assumption held on the political right and left that college is where faith goes to die.

The answer, in fact, is a lot more complicated.

True, college graduates are, according to Pew Research Center, around 5 percentage points more likely to identify as atheist or agnostic.

American Christians with college degrees are, however, just as likely — and, in some cases, more likely — to attend church regularly than those without.

Included in that “in some cases” are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

What the data shows

According to Pew’s latest data dump, a national survey gathered in 2023 and 2024, 86% of Latter-day Saints with a bachelor’s degree or higher attend church weekly compared to 59% of those without, a whopping 27 percentage point difference.

By comparison, 42% of Christians overall with at least a bachelor’s degree attend weekly, compared to 35% without, a 7-point gap.

There is reason to believe that these the self-reported numbers, at least in the case of Latter-day Saints, may fall on the high side.

A 2021-2023 Gallup report found an overall weekly attendance rate of 54%, with another 13% stating they go “almost every week.” Those numbers, too, were self-reported. In contrast, a report based on cellphone data harvested from 2.1 million Americans from April 2019 to the prepandemic month of February 2020 indicates the percentage of Latter-day Saints who attend regularly may be closer to 15%.

Nevertheless, the link between education and church attendance is well documented. Survey data of more than 18,000 Latter-day Saints going back 20 years, as crunched by Mormon Metrics’ American Religion Polling Aggregator, shows the chasm has remained roughly flat since at least 2008.

Neither is it an isolated variable.

According to the latest Pew study, those with a bachelor’s degree or higher were 20 points more likely to say religion was important in their lives and 19 points more likely to pray than those without.

Possible explanations

In a statement, church spokesperson Doug Andersen said these findings were part of a larger flourishing taking place within the church.

“Across the globe,” he said, “the church is experiencing a season of spiritual vitality and growth.”

According to Andersen, official church records show “consistent increases” in total membership and participation inside and outside the United States.

Experts, meanwhile, offer a few reasons for why the correlation between education and attendance exists.

Statistician Ryan Burge argues that, when it comes to American Christianity generally, the issue is not a matter of having the time to go to church. Specifically, his research all but rules out the hypothesis that less-educated Christians are more likely to have to work Sunday mornings.

“Whatever it is that turns private faith into public practice,” Burge writes on his website, Graphs About Religion, “it isn’t distributed evenly across education levels, and that gap seems to widen, not narrow, once the excuse of a job is gone. That’s worth some very serious reflection.”

When it comes to Latter-day Saints specifically, the answer for the correlation is probably complex, according to sociologist Tim Heaton. Nevertheless, the former professor at church-owned Brigham Young University favors a particular hypothesis centered on the way congregations operate in the Utah-based faith.

“Our lay ministry depends on skills that are enhanced by education,” he wrote in an email, “and that participation in the lay ministry integrates people into the religious community.”

Also worth noting is the fact that the global church runs several universities that churn out thousands upon thousands of Latter-day Saint graduates every year. If part of the reason for doing so is to cement a loyalty to the faith, there is evidence the strategy works.

Other findings

Additional observations regarding Latter-day Saints found in the Pew study include:

• Retention woes: Roughly half of Americans who were raised as Latter-day Saints still identify as members of the church in adulthood, down from 70% in 2007.

• Converts struggle more to stay: An estimated 63% of converts attend weekly, compared to 71% of lifelong members.

• Growing diversity: The portion of Latter-day Saints who identify as white has fallen from 85% in 2007 to 72% today.

• Fewer kids: 37% have children under 18 living under their roof, down from 49% in 2007.

• Supportive of women in the workplace: 61% said more women in the workforce is a change for the better, compared to 49% in 2014.

• Pro-pluralism: Latter-day Saint Republicans are consistently more in favor of immigrants, racial diversity and multiculturalism than the average Republican.

• Consistently Republican: The share of Latter-day Saints who identify with the GOP varies little across demographic groups — with one exception: Members living in the Intermountain West are, at 84%, some 23 points more likely to identify with the party.

In all, 565 Latter-day Saints participated in the study, resulting in a margin of error of plus or minus 6 percentage points for the group as a whole.