The Religion And Politics Of Students Who Were Homeschooled
(ANALYSIS) I went to a fairy conservative Southern Baptist Church in rural Illinois as a kid. It was a big congregation — I bet we had 300 in worship on an average Sunday when I was a teenager.
We also had a pretty robust youth group, which looking back on it now, was the center of my social life. I spent more time with those kids than I did any other group at school. Church camp, lock-ins and midweek youth group was just a regular routine for me at that time.
Most of the youth group were people I went to high school or grade school with, but there were a significant number of kids who didn’t go to school at all — they were homeschooled.
The best way that I would describe these homeschooled kids was a slightly toned down version of the Duggars of “19 Kids and Counting” fame. There were two pretty prominent families in First Baptist Church that each had five children.
I knew from my interactions with them that they took their faith very seriously and they also were incredibly conservative. And yes, I know the stereotype is that homeschooled kids are socially awkward. In my experience that was generally (but not universally) the case.
It’s a population group that I’ve always wanted to try to understand better, but it’s a super hard methodological problem. There’s no central database that tracks them.
The best estimates range from 1.9 to 2.7 million homeschooled kids in the United States. For comparison, there are nearly 50 million kids in public schools nationwide.
The best data that I’ve come across is from FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), which does an annual survey of college students. So this isn’t a representative sample of all kids who were homeschooled. It’s homeschooled kids who went to college.
Before I zoom in on the homeschooled respondents, let me show you the schools with the highest percentage of students who did not attend a public school in this data.
The total sample FIRE collected was nearly 59,000 students spread across 257 universities. In that data, there were a total of 1,350 students who reported that they had been homeschooled, or 2.3%, but there were quite a bit more students in the sample who either reported that they attended a private school or a parochial high school.
The one that clearly leads the way here is Hillsdale College. New Yorker magazine described it as, “The Christian Liberal-Arts School at the Heart of the Culture Wars. “It’s become an example among political conservatives of how higher education should happen.
It also, apparently, attracts a whole bunch of homeschooled kids. It has, by a very large margin, the highest concentration of kids who do not have a formal education in a public or private school system.
To read the rest of Ryan Burge’s column, please visit his Substack page.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.