Campus climate, Jewish life, and how to make a college 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. These are serious questions and they deserve serious answers, not reassurances, not panic, and not vague advice that sounds helpful but tells you nothing.

What the Data Actually Shows

The pattern is not uniform. It is specific. The schools where Jewish students have reported the most distress are concentrated among elite institutions, particularly in the Northeast, that have historically had large Jewish populations. Columbia is the most documented example. Harvard and Penn 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 and where students report feeling comfortable being openly Jewish. The mistake is treating this as a single undifferentiated problem. It is specific to certain institutions, and the response of leadership has varied enormously.

What Actually Matters When You Evaluate a School

Administrative response, not just incidents. Every large campus will have some antisemitic incidents. The meaningful question is how the institution responded. 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. A school with a well-funded, actively used Hillel where students regularly show up is a school where Jewish identity is normalized. 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. The most useful information I can get is from a twenty-minute conversation with a current Jewish student I did not get from the admissions office. Visit during the academic year. Walk into the Hillel unannounced. The students will tell you what the brochure will not.

Schools That Are Getting This Right

Tulane has roughly 44 percent Jewish undergraduates, not because it is a Jewish institution, but because it has become a place where Jewish students feel genuinely at home. George Washington University has one of the highest Jewish percentages of any private university in the country and a Hillel deeply embedded in campus culture. Emory, Brandeis, Boston University, and the University of Maryland all have substantial Jewish communities and meaningful administrative support. Brown is one of only two Ivy League schools where Jewish enrollment has grown over the past decade and its administration acted more decisively in response to campus protests than several peer institutions.

A Harder Conversation About Prestige

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. I am not going to tell a family their student should not apply to Columbia or Harvard. Those are extraordinary institutions with profound Jewish histories, 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. A student who attends a school where they can be openly Jewish, 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 and thrive than a student at a more prestigious institution spending energy managing their identity. That matters. Four years is a long time.

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.