“The Selectivity Divide: A Longitudinal Study of Religious Pluralism in United States Higher Education”

Institutions of higher education have a critical role in fostering religious pluralism, defined as the active engagement with religious difference. Selectivity is societally important to religious pluralism because of pluralism’s role in culturally shaping elite and economically privileged adults through higher education. This study explores how institutional selectivity is associated with students’ rhetorical and behavioral commitments to religious pluralism, addressing a major gap in the literature on diversity in higher education. We use three waves of data (2015–19) from the Interfaith Diversity Experiences and Attitudes Longitudinal Survey (IDEALS) to track these dual modes of commitment to religious pluralism. We find that students at more selective institutions demonstrate stronger rhetorical commitments to religious pluralism at the beginning of college, partially mediated by socioeconomic status, liberal political orientation, and pre-college interfaith experiences. Meanwhile, students at less selective institutions modestly increase over their undergraduate experience in these commitments, but their more elite counterparts do not. However, selectivity does not significantly predict students’ behavioral commitment to religious pluralism, as operationalized as their interfaith engagement, though across selectivity level students increase in this dimension. Our findings have important implications for how institutions might foster serious engagement with religious diversity in an increasingly polarized society.