Evangelical Colleges Make Marks in a Secular World

Their attitude seemed to be, "Are you basically a backwoods fundamentalist right out of the Scopes monkey trial?" he recalled.

Two decades later, Kihlstrom is sending some of his top students off to graduate school at elite universities such as Stanford, Harvard and Caltech. And he gets fewer questions from skeptics about whether Westmont embraces modern science.

In California and nationally, evangelical colleges and universities are gaining broader acceptance and moving closer to the academic mainstream.

Enrollments are surging, especially in Southern California, home to two of the largest schools. The percentage of students heading to graduate school is rising and some of the institutions have edged up in college rankings. Evangelical scholars, meanwhile, are having a bigger effect in academic circles, occasionally attracting job offers from Ivy League schools.

These scholars "are being seen more as peers than would have been the case 20 years ago," said Alexander W. Astin, director of UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute. And many of the schools themselves are trying "to pursue academic excellence in traditional terms, by which I mean recruiting students with higher SAT scores and faculty who are known scholars in their fields."

The rising stature of evangelical schools stems in part from growing attention to diversity in academia, which opened the door, not just to ethnic and racial minorities but also to evangelical thinkers.

At the same time, parents and students increasingly are seeking out colleges that emphasize conservative moral values, which still set evangelical schools apart from most of academia. They look to schools like Wheaton College in Illinois, one of the most prestigious of the evangelical liberal arts colleges, which only this month held its first social dance -- other than a square dance -- since the school's founding in 1860.

Although evangelical schools account for only 3.1% of students in four-year colleges in California and 2.2% nationally, the schools' enrollment growth in the state and around the country has outpaced that of public and other private institutions.