This is in reference to Avi Ciment’s column last week (“Do Our Actions Jive With Our Beliefs? December 5, 2024), which discussed the attrition rates in the Modern Orthodox community, both in general and specifically as it is affected by attendance of secular colleges. While I agree with the overall point that we should have our actions align with our values and that there is serious work to be done on the dropout rate of our community, I have a different, more positive interpretation of our general attrition rates, and a possibly more negative, or at least uncomfortable, interpretation of the numbers for those attending secular college, as I did.
For general attrition rates, many quote the Pew study which found 67% of American adults who were raised Orthodox still identify as such, meaning 33% do not, and walk away with the faulty interpretation that this means that currently, an Orthodox child has a 67% chance of staying Orthodox. This is not what this statistic means; this number is taken as an average attrition rate for all living Jewish adults who were raised Orthodox, people who just became adults all the way to those who were raised Orthodox 60 years prior. The contrast of the infrastructure in the Orthodox world 60 years ago and today is incomparable, and there is no reason to assume the future attrition rate will remain the same as it did for those decades prior.
In fact, the good news is that while there is work to be done, the stats show that there is what to be optimistic about. Quoting an excerpt from Professor Michelle Shain, former director of the OU Center for Communal Research, in the Jewish Action Magazine: “Thirty years ago, the Council of Jewish Federations conducted the 1990 National Jewish Population Survey and found that only 22% of those who had been raised Orthodox still identified as Orthodox. In other words, American Orthodoxy’s overall retention rate jumped from 22% to 67% over the past 30 years.” I highly recommend reading the full, very short piece in Professor Shain’s section at jewishaction.com/jewish-world/where-do-we-go-from-here.
Now for the less comfortable interpretation regarding the attrition rate for those going to secular college. For this section Mr. Ciment did not cite any specific study, making it harder to address, but my point would likely apply to any study on this topic. These studies will take a survey of Jewish adults, find a percentage that went to secular college are no longer Orthodox, and then walk away with the conclusion that the individuals in that percentage left observance due to the influences of secular college, which is the conclusion taken by Mr. Ciment.
Here’s the less comfortable reality — a huge majority of the kids with an Orthodox upbringing that leave secular college non-observant also entered college non-observant, and were non-observant already in their yeshiva high school days. In my anecdotal experience at Rutgers, while there definitely were a handful of kids leaving observance mid-college, it was a small percentage, barely a rounding error. But there were plenty of kids who hadn’t been shomer Shabbat since they were 14, and of course continued that path in college. In my all boys high school, I would estimate that at least 25% of my graduating class (2015) was not observant at the time of graduation, completely unbeknownst to their parents and teachers. My friends who went to coed high schools reported, in their anecdotal experience, higher numbers, from 30% to as high as 60% of their 12th grade class non-observant. Of course some of these kids come back to observance in their Israel gap year. But it didn’t take secular college to scare them out of observance originally, it happened right in our backyard. Of course when kids that aren’t shomer Shabbat or kosher go to college, whether secular or religious, they likely won’t magically become observant. These are the kids that are the focus of these scary survey results, and while Yeshiva University is great, I do not find these surveys as a valid reason to convince parents not to send their kids to secular college.
I think the bigger concern is how much we rely on the gap year to “fix” any kids that left observance at some point in their upbringing. Sure, many who do a gap year end up observant again, but of course not all will go, and even if they did, why should our schools and communities be content with the idea that after 12 years and thousands in tuition, it could be all for nothing if your kid doesn’t go to this one last year in Israel? The amazing rabbis in these gap year programs don’t have magical powers that the rabbis in our schools and shuls are missing. We can work on combating attrition within our high schools without outsourcing the problem to yeshivas in Israel and taking no responsibility ourselves.
