This year marks one of the darkest years in the centuries-long history of the Ivy League. In the wake of the presidents of Harvard University, Columbia University, and the University of Pennsylvania tendering their resignations for failing to deem calls by students for the genocide of Jews a violation of their policies, antisemitism is alive and well in the Ivy League.

Student-protesters at Columbia and Yale University — many shouting hateful antisemitic rhetoric from behind masks — set up unlawful encampments to voice their displeasure with the Israeli response to the brutal October 7, 2023 Hamas terrorist attack against the Jewish nation. These encampments and protests at the center of campuses have disrupted campus life and jeopardized the safety of Jewish students.

Columbia Faces Consequences Amid Rising Campus Antisemitism

As if this maelstrom couldn’t get any worse, on March 7 of this year, Trump canceled roughly $400 million in grants and contracts “due to the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.” Did these schools deserve to be taken to term for their sidelining of Jewish students? Yes, indeed. Columbia certainly had this retribution coming, and the government would have been more than justified if their demands had ended there. However, a few days later, it also announced the cancellation of around 400 grants related to biomedical research. This move throws out the very real threat of antisemitism with the bathwater of government overreach.

So, what will come of the rising antisemitism on Ivy League campuses, the failure of these administrators to take appropriate action to protect their Jewish students, and the harmful actions of the Trump administration? Will the Jewish population fall at the Ivies?

Jewish Population at Ivy League Schools Declining

As Shira Telushkin wrote in a piece on declining Jewish enrollment a few years back for Tablet, “In 2010, Penn was just under 20 percent Jewish, according to data collected by the Steinhardt Social Research Institute. By 2016, only 13 percent of the campus identified as Jewish by religion, a decrease of over 600 Jewish students. (When including students who claimed only ethnic or cultural affiliation, those numbers jump three percentage points.)”

Telushkin continued, “And Penn is far from the only Ivy League campus to note a decline. To take another example, throughout the 2000s, about 20 percent of incoming freshmen at Yale University identified as Jewish, according to data collected by the Yale University Chaplain’s Office. In the 2010s, that number was closer to 16 percent. For the past three years, The Harvard Crimson has reported that about 10 percent of incoming first-year students identified as Jewish, according to their own survey. For the incoming Harvard class of 2020, that number has dropped to 6 percent.”

Jewish Enrollment Trends Shift Across the Ivy League

Fast forward to 2025, and the size of the Jewish undergraduate student bodies at some Ivy League schools has declined even further while some have rebounded ever so slightly.

According to data kept by Hillel (and keeping in mind that many of the Ivy League schools don’t ask students to identify their faith on their applications, so these are estimates), among the eight Ivy League schools, over just the last two years alone, the decline is most noticeable at UPenn and Princeton University. At other schools, especially Harvard, the Jewish population has rebounded from record lows in 2023.

The data for 2025 is still forthcoming and may well reveal yet more declines in the Jewish population of these schools as Jewish students continue to choose other elite schools over the Ivy League for fear of their safety, but that remains to be seen.

Ivy League Institution	Jewish Percentage of Undergraduate Student Body (2024)	Jewish Percentage of Undergraduate Student Body (2023)	Jewish Percentage of Undergraduate Student Body (2022)	Total Number of Jewish Undergraduate Students (2024)	Total Number of Jewish Undergraduate Students (2023)	Total Number of Jewish Undergraduate Students (2022)	Total Number of Undergraduate Students (2024)	Total Number of Undergraduate Students (2023)	Total Number of Undergraduate Students (2022)
Brown University	23.90%	23.90%	23.86%	1,700	1,700	1,700	7,125	7,125	7,125
Columbia University	22.80%	22.50%	22.33%	1,500	1,500	1,500	6,578	6,688	6,716
Cornell University	20.10%	15.60%	21.21%	2,500	2,500	2,500	12,418	10,163	11,785
Dartmouth College	9.20%	8.80%	8.82%	400	400	400	4,367	4,533	4,533
Harvard University	25.50%	8.80%	9.87%	1,800	700	700	7,062	7,178	7,095
University of Pennsylvania	13.00%	16.40%	17.57%	1,300	1,600	1,750	9,995	9,760	9,962
Princeton University	8.60%	9.60%	11.46%	450	500	600	5,236	5,236	5,236
Yale University	11.80%	12.10%	12.24%	800	800	800	6,811	6,639	6,535

As Antisemitism Surges, Will Jewish Students Turn Away from the Ivies?

Antisemitism is nothing new in the Ivy League. In the early twentieth century, Harvard’s president, A. Lawrence Lowell, openly used quotas to cap the number of Jewish students at the Ivy League institution. Lowell’s antisemitism, in many ways, birthed the practice of legacy admission.

But never before has antisemitism across the Ivy League been so visible — particularly at Columbia, Cornell University, Harvard, UPenn, and Yale (Dartmouth College has been an exception, lighting the way forward for other universities). But with news coverage focused squarely on these protests and with Jewish high school students rightly fearful for their safety on certain Ivy League campuses, will it lead to significant declines in Jewish representation next year?

We think not. Contrary to the words of a college counselor whose salacious and often misleading quotes are regularly printed in The New York Post, we do not anticipate Jewish students to eschew the likes of Harvard and Yale for Southern Methodist University.

Ivy League Education Remains a Beacon for Jewish Students

Perhaps it takes a Jewish person to share something that non-Jews may never understand about our people. We will always seek out the very best education in the world. After all, if history is any guide, people — nations even — can take our businesses, possessions, even our lives, but they can never take our education.

It’s why we expect Jewish students never to stop pursuing the finest education in America — and that education is at Ivy League schools and their peer institutions. It doesn’t mean schools like Columbia won’t experience fleeting blips for their despicable actions and inaction over these months. Still, we at Ivy Coach do not foresee a dramatic drop in Jewish enrollment in the coming years.