PB:
per IPEDS, Georgetown is 14% international whereas BC is 8%, and the % Asian and Hispanic students is similar for both schools.
https://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/?q=Boston+College&s=all&id=164924#enrolmt
https://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/?q=georgetown+Univ&s=all&id=131496
OK, this thread is spinning out of control. If a Jewish parent or applicant doesn’t feel comfortable at BC (or Georgetown, HC, ND, etc.) that is ok. No apologies necessary and no explanation required. College selection is all about comfort/ fit. Please do not equate this feeling with discrimination or “reducing someone as a person”. Likewise, if a rural kid doesn’t feel at home at Columbia, or a city kid doesn’t like Colby. Same goes for a politically conservative person feeling uncomfortable at Brown, or a liberal person feeling uncomfortable at Washington and Lee. Visit a variety of schools that fit your academic profile and interests and enroll in the school that fits your needs, wants and aspirations. No school is perfect, but to say that BC doesn’t welcome all types of people in 2019 is untethered from reality (at best) or an exercise in mischief making on a public forum.
But the OP didn’t say she/D wouldn’t feel comfortable, she was asking for advice as to whether her D would feel comfortable, mostly based on religion.
It is the D who has to fit in with BC, not BC that will adjust to the student. People are just posting with info on what BC is and how it presents. Look how many people were surprised that a Mass is part of graduation and orientation.
Again, mass is one of many events and activities scheduled for orientation and graduation. Totally optional. Many attend, many don’t. For some the Jesuit identity is important, for some it is incidental or irrelevant. Visiting is the best way to get a feel for this. If a perspective student doesn’t like the BC “vibe” than he/she should not apply…just like any other school…there are no secrets.
Another point is that you need to remember that Jews (according to the Pew Research Center) as a group are politically liberal while BC tends to be run conservative and when you combine that with a very prominent Catholic/Jesuit affiliation, it doesn’t make for the most welcoming environment for the average Jewish student.
Having only 200 Jews on campus (2%) is very telling to me especially when you review the % of Jewish students at peer colleges in the Boston area. For example, according to Hillel.org, BU has 22% Jews (4,000); Tufts 18% (1,000) and even though Harvard’s Jewish population is dropping it’s 11% (750).
There are kids that don’t like the feel of a campus from the instant their car rolled onto the campus. When college is home for the next 4 years, that “feel” , reliable or not, plays a huge role in picking schools. Just the way it goes.
But there are other things that come into play even before checking out a school. I, for one, was hesitant about considering schools in some parts of the Deep South. We didn’t look at HBCUs. Yeshiva University was not on the list. My guys didn’t care for the colleges that had gone coed from being women’s schools historically. They had their biases as I had mine when I considered colleges for myself.
The question here is how important the issues that the OP has brought up are, with regard to BC. If OP’s daughter doesn’t like the vibe when she checks it out, that’s the end of it. Since BC fits what this student wants in a school, at this point with a major concern being the fact that it is Catholic, the discussion here is how much of an issue that might be. Should the school even be on the list?
In my neighborhood, even if BC were the perfect school by description, Jewish families would not even consider it. Not a one, in the 20 something years I’ve lived here. Not a single one. And BC’s stats show that, indeed, very few students there who identify as Jewish.
IMO, given what OP says are the concerns about BC, it’s still worth the visit and consideration. I know a lot of BC kids and though most of them identify as Catholic (and I know some who absolutely are not Catholic, as well), most of them are more agnostic in practice than of any religion. Which is the way it often is with kids that age. To me, the differences among an agnostic Protestant and an agnostic Catholic or any religion, for that matter are irrelevant. I get a bit more concerned about those who very religious because that is an issue that needs to be addressed if relationships get serious. I say “concerned”, but I don’t mean that In a dire way. It is important in a close relationship
I went to the facts sheets for each school folks. It’s directional and a moving target. No selective stats. Does BC have a larger Hispanic and Asian population yes. Is it a smaller AA. Yes. International. If the numbers are wrong. But when you contradict s person please go to base level source material. BC has a 10 percent international cohort. It’s in the Fact book. I could have found a wrong year for Gtown. Don’t think so but it’s not the point I was making. The slicing of the onion so thin was my point.
And I’m not really that invested to post every link. But it’s close enough for the basic point that one being observably more diverse as a student is absurd.
Also from my earlier post this was cut and pasted data from the fact sheet. And also to the point of the Jewish student body it was 100 percent from the schools themselves. And clearly GTown has a larger but still tiny student cohort. Please look at the larger picture here.
Summary. 67 percent identify as Christian or Catholic at Georgetown.
42 percent of students check Catholic. 25 percent check off Protestant Christian.
6 percent Jewish
Cut and paste
“The student population at Georgetown University is 51.9% White, 7.98% Asian, 7.18% Black or African American, 6.95% Hispanic or Latino, 2.78% Two or More Races, 0.124% American Indian or Alaska Native, and 0.119% Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islanders.”
So how is this selective data? Maybe wrong somehow but publicly available and reported.
BC is 3 percent more Christian.
This was only to actually compare data on diversity than the common opinion on things. Georgetown I guess could be considered a bit more diverse. But please.
I thought 70% identify themselves specifically as Catholic at BC not Christian and/or Catholic, but Catholic vs 40 something at Georgetown
That’s a good point. You are correct. I was comparing what I could find. But there could be a good percentage of non catholic Christians too.
70 percent is the number I could find. It could be higher combined. Good point. It could be much higher but not everyone checks the box. In the gtown research I could find it seemed that more checked nothing than BC if memory serves me. Not sure if they are agnostic or chose not to identify.
And the problem is many identify and much less practice.
I did personally find ND and Catholic U to be a bit more religious in vibe. PC too. Salve Regina and Merrimack. Fairfield more like PC.
Holy Cross felt more like a LAC version of BC.
Georgetown looked pretty religious too but didn’t feel that way as much walking around and in the info sessions it had a completely different DC vibe than the New England schools. Imho.
Hard to say how accurate the 70% figure is. There is a strong sentiment that it favors the applicant to be Catholic. As I said earlier, it does not, except in the cases of some feeder schools. In fact, I would say it’s a tip to not be Catholic because BC does want diversity and has a huge pool of Catholic applicants.
So there are applicants that may stretch any Catholic connection they might have, thinking that would be advantageous. Also, there are many agnostic Students with Catholic backgrounds.
As I stated earlier, my kids identify as Catholics even though they are non practicing. No current SOs are Catholic. It was not a criterion at all in terms of socializing and dating and having serious relationships. That’s the case for most Catholics I know. I feel absolutely no line of demarcation these days between most Catholics and Protestants. All Christians. And a lot of them are agnostic or atheists in varying degrees. There are religions that tend to be practiced more stringently more of the time where consorting with those outside of the faith is still problematic to families. I think that is the case for many of my Jewish neighbors. They would prefer to have their children in schools and other environments with far more Jewish peers than a school like BC has. It’s not just BC and Catholic schools that are issues. Wake Forest, for example, has come up as not having enough Jewish students. The same with the Christian schools.
OP asked a simple question (or a series of questions). How Catholic is BC? Does it impact admissions and life at BC? Of the Catholic colleges/universities, I would rank Notre Dame and Holy Cross at the higher end of “Catholicism”. Both have student bodies of 80% plus Catholic, but more than that, there is an explicit Catholic ethos that drives the school. BC is perhaps a bit more “Catholic” than Georgetown, both in percentage of Catholic students and “ethos”, but both are a far cry from ND or HC. I do not think that a non-Catholic student at any of these institutions would have issues (and I was one several decades ago). But that does not mean that BC is for everyone. BC, like its cohorts, is a work hard play hard athletically oriented school. Sure, there are scholars. But it is not all about intellectual absorption (which happens, but as much in late nights at the dorm rather than on Walden Pond). It is a “conservative campus” by college standards, which means it is slightly left of moderate. So if you are super liberal, like to dye your hair purple, and otherwise want to revolt against establishment…Amherst and Brown are probably better choices. But this is no knock on BC (or these other schools). BC is an incredibly inclusive Jesuit experience. At the end of the day, none of this is a BC issue - it is an applicant/student issue. If a Jewish student wants more Jewish students around them, BC is a poor choice. Not because BC is in any way anti-Semitic or not welcoming, just that Jewish students (and many others) chose not to apply or attend because of its Catholic affiliation (rightly or wrongly though I would say wrongly). If students do not like big time athletics, don’t blame BC. I have seen students at Notre Dame decry football Saturdays (perhaps with good rational reasons), but give me a break - did you not know that this was part of the ND culture?
I will close by noting that I have become Catholic since my experience as an atheist/agnostic at Georgetown (you never know where life and faith may take you) and am welcoming my Jewish roommate from Georgetown to visit this next week. Jesuit institutions teach you a lot about life.
BC is a welcoming place for all students. But if it is not what you want, for any variety of reasons, don’t blame BC. Just go somewhere else.
BC (and most Jesuit colleges) probably look at candidates that brings religious diversity to campus with interest. BC, HC (where our high stats, Protestant ((gasp)) kid got in and attends), Fordham, GT, Villanova (and others) are tough admits for anyone, I would be concerned about getting admitted in the first place. BC (and HC) are very welcoming from our personal, anecdotal experience.