Jewish enrollment at Harvard is at a record low, and Harvard won’t say why.
In a new report, the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance (HJAA) says the university refuses to collect and release information that would shed light on how Jews, a protected group under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, lost half their representation in the Harvard student body over the span of a decade.
Harvard is committed to “cultivating a community that is open, welcoming, and inclusive.” As a matter of policy, it tracks and reports enrollment by race, gender, geography, income, and first-generation status, according to the study. But for some reason, it stopped counting Jews in the early 1990’s.
The report says the decline in Jewish enrollment has compounded steadily since around 2004, but it went unremarked, much less addressed, because Harvard chose not to monitor it.
And now, Harvard’s Jewish undergraduate enrollment has plummeted to 7 percent, “the lowest level recorded since before World War II, and the lowest of any Ivy League institution with reliable data.”
For perspective, during the period studied in the report, Harvard and Yale saw the steepest declines, with Jewish enrollment falling by 50 and 42 percent, respectively, since 2013—a rate far faster than their White non-Jewish peers. Princeton’s Jewish enrollment was relatively stable, serving as a benchmark, while at Brown and Cornell, Jewish enrollment held steady or grew, according to the report:
The yawning gap between Harvard and its peers can’t be explained by across-the-board admissions priorities such as diversity policies, international student growth, or athletic recruiting, to name a few of the factors studied in the report—factors that tilt away from the Jewish demographic. If it did, the group argues, Jewish enrollment would decline at approximately the same rate as the White non-Jewish decline.
These factors don’t explain why Harvard is emptying its campus of Jews at a record rate.
There is one way to answer the question, the group says, and that is to simply keep track of how many Jews apply, how many are accepted, and how many enroll—again, something Harvard had been doing for years.
Harvard has hidden behind the dearth of data to avoid accountability for its dwindling Jewish enrollment. At the 2023 House hearings on campus antisemitism, then-President Claudine Gay balked when Rep. Elise Stefanik asked her why there are suddenly so few Jews at Harvard.
She couldn’t say, because Harvard doesn’t ask religious affiliation as part of the admissions process:
The report urges Harvard to collect and release the data from its applicant pipeline.
“An institution that tracked every other demographic characteristic of its applicant pool for decades, and chose not to track this one, cannot now claim the absence of data as a defense. It owns that absence.”
It’s a classic case of willful blindness. “Harvard measures what it chooses to measure. It chose not to measure this.”
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