Jewish enrolment at Harvard University has fallen to an estimated 7 per cent, its lowest level since before the Second World War. Between 1967 and 1996, Jewish students comprised roughly 20–25 per cent of Harvard’s student body. Today, that figure has declined by roughly 70 per cent.

Where have Harvard’s Jewish students gone? And why has one of the world’s most esteemed universities shown so little urgency in confronting such a dramatic shift?

Harvard has long served as a bellwether for American higher education. Its admissions practices and institutional priorities have often foreshadowed broader trends across elite universities. If Jewish representation has eroded this dramatically at Harvard, is it an isolated phenomenon or part of a broader pattern?

Yale University’s Jewish population has reportedly fallen from approximately 25 per cent to 12 per cent, while the University of Pennsylvania has experienced a similar decline, the Jewish campus organisation Hillel .

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Of course, some elite universities – especially Columbia – have been widely criticised for their handling of antisemitic incidents in the wake of 7 October 2023. But even those that did a much better job of protecting their Jewish students have apparently seen Jewish enrolments decline.

Dartmouth College is a good example. Under president Sian Leah Beilock, Dartmouth has deservedly earned high praise for taking a firm stance against antisemitism while maintaining its commitment to academic freedom and institutional neutrality. Yet Dartmouth’s Jewish population has remained steady at roughly 10 per cent, Hillel estimates.

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Equally, Vanderbilt University chancellor Daniel Diermeier has cultivated a campus environment that many Jewish families view as welcoming. The university made a very public, concerted effort in the early 2000s to attract more Jewish students, increasing Jewish enrolment from roughly 3 per cent to about 15 per cent over the past two decades. But while Vanderbilt has earned well-deserved praise for standing alongside its Jewish students amid rising antisemitism, there is, at least not yet, no public evidence of a recent surge in Jewish enrolment.

Nor is there evidence, beyond necessarily inconclusive anecdotes, of a mass migration to Duke, Washington, Northwestern, Chicago or other highly selective universities.

But we don’t know that for sure because most universities don’t publicly report the size of their Jewish student populations and the figures reported above are necessarily imperfect as not all Jewish students participate in Hillel; many don’t affiliate with any Jewish organisation while on campus.

Many universities don’t even ask applicants whether they identify as Jewish. During the 2025-26 admissions cycle, only a small minority of the universities ranked in the US News top 50 “national universities” gave applicants the opportunity to identify their religious affiliation. Of these schools, three are themselves religiously affiliated.

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As we mark the third anniversary of the 7 October terrorist attacks against Israel, perhaps it is time for that to change. Applicants should have the option, not the obligation, to disclose their religious identity, just as they may choose to disclose their race or first-generation status. Of course, that optionality means the figures still won’t be definitive, but they will be less incomplete and, therefore, more useful.

For what? The aim is not to freeze today’s demographic composition in perpetuity, establish religious quotas, or give an applicant an admissions advantage because of faith. But to know what is happening, such data can be separated from the admissions decisions and used for institutional research, just as the Common Application allows colleges to suppress applicants’ race and ethnicity from the application PDFs they review. Religious identity, meanwhile, is treated haphazardly and inconsistently. Some highly selective universities ask, but most don’t.

Some will argue that collecting information about the size of Jewish cohorts is difficult to justify in the post-affirmative-action landscape the government is promoting. But the Common Application still gives applicants the option to identify their race and ethnicity, and universities continue to track and report the racial and ethnic composition of their student bodies.

The end of race-conscious admissions does not require universities to become blind to demographics. And after years in which Jewish students have reported antisemitism and hostility on college campuses, universities should want to know whether Jewish students are increasingly choosing to go elsewhere. This is highly relevant to evaluating their admissions policies and determining whether corrective action is warranted.

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I saw this blind spot firsthand as an admissions officer at Penn, an institution once so closely associated with Jewish academic life that it was dubbed in some circles the “Jewish Ivy”. Admissions officers aren’t privy to data on the size of the Jewish student population because unless applicants actively write about their Judaism, Jewish representation is largely out of sight and, as a result, out of mind. But it shouldn’t be. 

To borrow a phrase by former Harvard president Claudine Gay during her congressional hearing about campus antisemitism at the end of 2023, the rights and wrongs of the apparently dramatic decline in Jewish representation at some of America’s most prestigious universities does not “depend on the context”. It is something that all such institutions should want to know about. And it’s something that all such institutions should want to do something about.

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Jayson Weingarten served as an admissions officer at the University of Pennsylvania. He is now a senior admissions consultant at .