On Losing Faith in College

Here’s my question: What was the single-biggest “encourager” of your faith while you were in college? Without it, perhaps you think you may have left your faith.

This article explores the values of routine worship and mentoring.

Before leaving the Midwest for Yale University here, Ms. Leya also got some parting advice from her grandmother. “Don’t lose your faith,” Ms. Leya, 22, recalls being told, “out there on that liberal East Coast.”

In their divergent ways, Ms. Leya’s teacher and grandmother were expressing the conventional wisdom about religious young people heading off to college. Exposed to Nietzsche, Hitchens, co-ed dorms and beer pong, such students are almost expected to stray. Just as surely, the standard thinking goes, their adult lives of marriage and parenthood will bring them back to observance.

Things didn’t work out quite that way for Ms. Leya. In her four years at Yale, which culminate in commencement this weekend, she never missed a Sunday Mass and joined in weekly discussions of scripture. As a typical underachieving Yalie, she also drew cartoons for the student newspaper, captained the club tennis team, participated in a Polish cultural society and, oh by the way, earned her way into Northwestern’s medical school with a 3.78 grade point average as a biology major.