What the data actually says, what to look for beyond the headlines, and how to make a decision you can feel good about

Over the past two years, I have had more conversations with Jewish families about campus antisemitism than in all my previous years of counseling combined. The October 7 attacks and the campus protests that followed changed something, not just in the news cycle, but in the way families are approaching the college search itself.

Families who would never previously have asked about Jewish life on campus are now asking. Students who identified more culturally than religiously are now thinking carefully about what it means to be Jewish at a school where that identity might be contested. And parents who spent years telling their children to reach for the most prestigious institutions are now wondering whether prestige and safety are in tension in ways they had not anticipated.

These are serious questions, and they deserve serious answers, not reassurances, not panic, and not the kind of vague advice that sounds helpful but tells you nothing. Here is how I think through it.

What the Data Actually Shows

The pattern that has emerged over the past two years is not uniform. It is specific. The schools where Jewish students have reported the most distress, where protests turned into harassment, where administrators responded slowly or inadequately, where Jewish students felt they had to hide their identity or self-censor, are concentrated among a group of elite institutions, particularly in the Northeast, that have historically had large Jewish populations.

Columbia is the most documented example. The campus encampments in the spring of 2024, the administration's response, and the sustained targeting of Jewish students have been covered extensively and are a legitimate consideration for any family evaluating that school. Harvard, Penn, and several other highly selective institutions have had similar, if less extreme, experiences.

At the same time, there are schools with large, thriving Jewish communities where the climate has remained genuinely welcoming, where administrators acted quickly, where Jewish organizations are well-resourced and prominent, and where students report feeling comfortable being openly Jewish. These schools exist, and many of them are excellent academically.

The mistake is to treat this as a single undifferentiated problem. It is not. It is specific to certain institutions, and the response of institutional leadership has varied enormously.

What to Look for Beyond the Headlines

News coverage of campus antisemitism tends to follow the most dramatic events at the most prominent schools. This creates a distorted picture. A school that did not make the news is not necessarily safer, it may simply have had fewer cameras. And a school that made the news for a protest is not necessarily uninhabitable, what matters is how the administration responded and what has changed since.

Here is what actually matters when evaluating a school in this dimension:

Administrative response, not just incidents. Every large campus will have some level of antisemitic incidents, this is a sad fact of contemporary campus life. The more meaningful question is how the institution responded. Did leadership issue a clear, prompt statement? Were students disciplined for violations of the code of conduct? Did the university take concrete steps, or did it offer language and then do nothing? The ADL's Campus Antisemitism Report Card grades universities on exactly these criteria and is worth consulting directly.

The strength of the Hillel and Chabad. The campus Jewish community is not just a social amenity. It is an infrastructure, a physical space, a professional staff, programming, meals, services, Israel engagement, and a network of students who are invested in Jewish life. A school with a well-funded, actively used Hillel where students regularly show up is a school where Jewish identity is normalized and valued. Hillel International publishes data on Jewish student populations and engagement for hundreds of campuses. Use it.

What Jewish students actually say. Not what the university says about its Jewish community, what students say. The most useful information I can get about a campus is from a twenty-minute conversation with a current Jewish student, preferably one I did not get from the admissions office. Ask the Hillel to connect you with a student. Ask your network. Visit during the academic year and walk into the Hillel unannounced. The students will tell you what the brochure will not.

The direction of travel. Is the Jewish community at this school growing or shrinking? Is Hillel engagement up or down? Are Jewish students running for student government, starting organizations, and living openly? Or are they pulling back? The trend matters as much as the current number.

The Schools That Are Getting This Right

Let me name some specific schools where Jewish students are genuinely thriving, because I think the conversation too often stops at the problem without pointing toward solutions:

Tulane has developed one of the most remarkable Jewish campus cultures in the country. Roughly 44 percent of undergraduates are Jewish, not because Tulane is a Jewish institution, but because it has become a place where Jewish students feel genuinely at home. The community is not a subculture; it is woven into the fabric of campus life. New Orleans does not hurt.

George Washington University, in the heart of Washington DC, has one of the highest Jewish percentages of any private university in the country. Its Hillel is large, well-funded, and deeply embedded in campus culture. The DC location means students have access to a major metropolitan Jewish community, internship opportunities connected to Jewish organizations, and a campus where political engagement is the norm rather than the exception.

Emory, Brandeis, Boston University, and the University of Maryland all have substantial, active Jewish communities and have maintained meaningful administrative support for Jewish students through recent turbulence. None of these schools is without challenges, no school is, but they are institutions where Jewish life is a genuine part of the campus identity, not a peripheral feature.

Brown deserves a specific mention. It is one of only two Ivy League schools where Jewish enrollment has grown over the past decade, now at roughly 24 percent. Its administration acted more decisively in response to campus protests than several of its peer institutions. And its culture of intellectual openness and student autonomy tends to be genuinely hospitable to students who think seriously about identity.

A Harder Conversation About Prestige

Something needs to be said that most people in this field will not say. Some of the schools at the top of many Jewish families' lists are also the schools where Jewish students have had the most documented difficulty over the past two years. I am not going to tell a family that their student should not apply to Columbia or Harvard or Penn. Those are extraordinary institutions with profound Jewish histories and large Jewish communities, and many students will be fine there.

What I will say is that prestige is not a sufficient reason to dismiss legitimate concerns about campus climate. The question "will my student be safe and able to be openly Jewish here" is a reasonable question to ask about any school. If the answer requires significant qualification or relies heavily on hoping things have improved, that is information.

A student who attends a school where they feel genuinely at home, where they can be Jewish without calculation, where Shabbat dinner is a social norm rather than a subcultural act, where the administration has demonstrated it will act when students are targeted, is in a better position to learn, grow, and thrive than a student at a more prestigious institution where they are spending energy managing their identity.

That matters. Four years is a long time.

How to Have This Conversation With Your Student

One more thing about process. This is a conversation that benefits from being had explicitly, not just assumed. Different families have different relationships to Jewish identity, and students within the same family often have different relationships than their parents do.

Some students will want a campus where Jewish community is central to their social life. Others will want Jewish infrastructure to be available without it being defining. Still others will say, honestly, that they want a rigorous academic environment and Jewish life is a secondary consideration. All of these are legitimate. What matters is that the student knows what they actually want, not what they think they are supposed to want, and that the college list reflects it.

My job is to help families ask this question honestly and build a list that answers it well. The campus climate question is one piece of that, and an increasingly important one. There are excellent schools at every level of selectivity where Jewish students are genuinely flourishing. Finding the right one requires honesty, research, and, sometimes, the willingness to look past the name on the sweatshirt.