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.
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Become a SubscriberThe 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.)
