The Prospect of an Ivy League BYU

By 2039, another quarter century from now, BYU would have an average ACT score of 32. Basically an Ivy League school.

This post was originally published by MC at Junior Ganymede.

I did a search for “BYU” on Twitter on Saturday night to look for articles about the Cougars’ thrilling basketball victory over Gonzaga. Instead I got a steady stream of 17- and 18-year-old Mormon kids either celebrating getting into BYU or lamenting their rejection letters. It’s that time of year.

That got me wondering just how hard it is to get into BYU these days, in terms of ACT scores. People above the age of 40 who graduated from BYU like to say “I’d never get in there today,” but I wanted to see just how big a difference there was. The BYU admissions website only has average ACT scores (36-point scale) for the last three entering classes:

2012: 28.35
2013: 28.52
2014: 28.81

Almost a 29 ACT average! A kid who gets a 29 is going to be one of the 15–20 smartest kids in his class at most any high school he attends. My high school friend with a 28 didn’t seriously consider any school but BYU, and all of us figured he’d get in easily. Nowadays he’d be in the bottom half of the class. And that’s up half a point from only two years earlier.

I wanted to find actual numbers to see if this was a constant rate of increase. I found a link from the mid-aughts which gives a few scores that appear to have been taken from a now-defunct page at BYU:

2004: 27.4
2005: 27.5
2006: 27.8

So that’s an increase of about 1.5 points in a decade. Can we go further back? Yes:

“In 1989, entering freshmen had an average American College Test (ACT) composite score of 24.7.”

An increase of 2.7 points in 15 years, or 1.8 points per decade.

Just by ACT scores of entering freshman, BYU has progressed in 25 years from the comparative level of a respectable secondary state university to that of a nationally recognized flagship State U., like UCLA, Ohio State, or the University of Texas (maybe ever so slightly better, even).

Let’s say that the rate of increase slows to 1.25 points per decade. By 2039, another quarter century from now, BYU would have an average ACT score of 32. Basically an Ivy League school, on the level of Dartmouth, Cornell, Rice, etc. The astonishing thing is that BYU undergraduate student body, with 28,000, or about 7,000 students per class, is a little over half the size of the entire Ivy League undergraduate student body combined.

Because of the large size of the student body, there may be an upper limit to this kind of progress. Someone with better statistical chops might be able to say how many Ivy League-smart Mormon kids there are out there. And I suspect that, with the advent of US News rankings, the sorting of kids with high test scores into the highest ranking schools has pushed the scores of all competitive schools upward.

Still, I doubt there’s a single university out there which has statistically climbed as fast as BYU, and that’s reflected in a steady ride up the college rankings. Given what we know about the correlation of education and income level with church activity and fecundity among the LDS (hat tip to Dr. Charlton), this shouldn’t be too surprising. I personally expect that I will end up having about 3 times as many kids as the average man with my ACT score. Give that a couple of generations, and you’ve got a real change in the demographics of the highest scorers nationally.

This strikes me as almost entirely good news. It reflects tremendous growth in the Church, particularly in its American base, which provides the majority of the human and financial resources that support the Kingdom worldwide. The smarter the kids are at BYU, the harder it will be for the elites to dismiss the Church as just some yokel institution. The Cathedral can laugh off a Bob Jones University or Oral Roberts U. The Left would probably invent those schools if they didn’t exist, just to have someone to scorn. But an unapologetically Mormon BYU that is clearly one of the elite colleges in America will drive the anti-Christians nuts. “How can such smart people be such evil Christofascist sky god worshippers?!” (Here’s a classic in the genre). It’s the West Point for weapons-grade Mormonism.

I can see some stumbling blocks, though. The more elite BYU becomes, the more pressure will be brought to bear to make it more like a left-wing elite school. Some of the Sunday School-style scripture classes will be called an embarrassment to academic rigor. More scrutiny will be paid to “academic freedom,” a phrase in which, as with “political correctness” and “government accounting,” the modifier negates the noun.

I know there is now and always will be a Sunstone-type contingent at BYU. Mormon Unitarian-Universalists, basically, who choose, out of thousands of options, to come to one of the truly unique colleges in the country and gripe that it isn’t like every place else. Unless there is some stark reversal in the trend of higher and higher tuition at elite U.S. colleges, these kids will be ever-more enticed to come to BYU and get prestige at the tithe-paying member rate, complaining all the way.

What will be most interesting to me is how much cultural pull BYU will have versus BYU-Idaho. I think it is almost indisputable that, at some point in the near future, BYU-I will surpass Provo in enrollment. BYU-I has tripled in size in ten years, it’s essentially open enrollment, and it’s surrounded by farmland, while BYU has no room to grow. I seem to recall someone saying that the Rexburg Temple, which is currently just across from the BYU-I campus, is expected someday to be at the center of campus. A generation from now, BYU-I could easily be double the enrollment of BYU.

There are several examples of flagship state universities that are far more liberal than the rival State U. down the road, which often has a history of being an ag school or an engineering school, and is thus a little less Ivory Tower-ish and closer to the values of the working and middle classes. Some examples of this phenomenon, just off the top of my head, are Texas-Texas A&M, Indiana-Purdue, Alabama-Auburn, and Utah-Utah State. I would not be the least bit surprised if this is already somewhat true of BYU and BYU-I. Even though BYU is itself one of the most conservative schools in the country, I’d bet a pretty penny that Obama got a higher percentage of votes from BYU students and faculty than from BYU-I.

I hope that this sort of thing does not become a divide among the members. Right now, the only difference I see is between BYU grads who equate BYU with the Church, and non-BYU grads who don’t much care about BYU at all. But if BYU acquired the reputation of being the “liberal” Mormon school (and I hear that from people sometimes), going to BYU-I could end up signifying something more than just, “I am from Idaho and wanted to stay close to home” or “I didn’t get into BYU.”