Proof The Bible Is True

A recent nationwide survey found that the number of freshmen attending America’s colleges who have left their faith over the past three decades has skyrocketed.

After analyzing the religious affiliation trends of first-year college students, Computer Science professor Allen Downey – who teaches at Olin College in Needham, Massachusetts – disclosed that the statistics from the Cooperative Institutional Research Program’s (CIRP) 2016 Freshman Survey conducted at UCLA indicate that the number of students identifying as “nones,” who do not belong to a religion, has dramatically increased.

“The number of college students with no religious affiliation has tripled in the last 30 years – from 10 percent in 1986 to 31 percent in 2016 – according to data from the CIRP Freshman Survey,” Downey reported in the Scientific American. “Over the same period, the number who attended religious services dropped from 85 percent to 69 percent.”

Conducting the survey since 1966, CIRP annually asks incoming freshman about their beliefs, backgrounds and attitudes concerning their religious preference, as well as their attendance at religious services and other behaviors. In 2016, researchers surveyed more than 137,000 first-time students arriving at 184 colleges across the United States to find that students are increasingly falling away from their faith.

“These trends provide a snapshot of the current generation of young adults,” Downey noted. “They also provide a preview of rapid secularization in the U.S. over the next 30 years. [T]he number of students whose religious preference is ‘None’ has changed over time. The retreat from religion starts around 1990 and accelerates, averaging almost 1 percentage point per year.”

Read More: Study: College freshman leaving faith soars