God, Grades, and Graduation

I have taught for almost a quarter-century now at the high-school and university levels in Canada, the United States, and briefly Ukraine. Every year it seems conversation turns to what "today's teens" or "this generation of students" are or are not like, but my own undergraduate background in the social sciences, and my psychoanalytic instincts, make me leery of anecdotal generalizations of so sweeping a scale. But a new book, set for release at the end of this year, has some hard data from a fairly wide survey of students offering some very interesting insights: God, Grades, and Graduation: Religion's Surprising Impact on Academic Success by Ilana Horwitz (Oxford University Press, Dec. 2021), 288pp. 

About this book the publisher tells us this: 

The surprising ways in which a religious upbringing shapes the academic lives of teens

It's widely acknowledged that American parents from different class backgrounds take different approaches to raising their children. Upper and middle-class parents invest considerable time facilitating their children's activities, while working class and poor families take a more hands-off approach. These different strategies influence how children approach school. But missing from the discussion is the fact that millions of parents on both sides of the class divide are raising their children to listen to God. What impact does a religious upbringing have on their academic trajectories?

Drawing on 10 years of survey data with over 3,000 teenagers and over 200 interviews, God, Grades, and Graduation offers a revealing and at times surprising account of how teenagers' religious upbringing influences their educational pathways from high school to college. Dr. Ilana Horwitz estimates that approximately one out of every four students in American schools are raised with religious restraint. These students orient their life around God so deeply that it alters how they see themselves and how they behave, inside and outside of church.

This book takes us inside the lives of these teenagers to discover why they achieve higher grades than their peers, why they are more likely to graduate from college, and why boys from lower middle-class families particularly benefit from religious restraint. But readers also learn how for middle-upper class kids--and for girls especially--religious restraint recalibrates their academic ambitions after graduation, leading them to question the value of attending a selective college despite their stellar grades in high school. By illuminating the far-reaching effects of the childrearing logic of religious restraint, God, Grades and Graduation offers a compelling new narrative about the role of religion in academic outcomes and educational inequality.