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By the standards that please accountants, administrators, and the people who do the numbers, times have never been better for Christian higher education, or so it seems. After all, over the last ten years, total enrollment at Christian colleges has increased by more than 45 percent, nearly three times the rate of growth at the 1,600 private colleges and universities in the United States, and ten times the growth of enrollments in state schools. Total undergraduate enrollment at member institutions of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities now stands at over 135,000, with probably another 40,000 enrolled in ancillary and graduate programs. Endowments of Christian colleges have begun to creep up into the fabled top 500 of college and university endowments. Wheaton, the richest of all the Christian colleges, ranked 145th in the nation in terms of endowment in 1993, and ran a budget of $45.3 million; in 2002, its budget was $63 million, and its endowment stood at $159 million. The same good things were happening in other places, too. Messiah College, for instance, was sitting on an endowment of over $65 million in 1994 (ranking it 202nd in the nation) and $94 million in 2002; Gordon College saw its budget soar from $29 million in 1998 to $39 million in 2001.1

The high times even trickled down to the faculty. A full professor at Eastern College took home $44,000 in 1994; at Messiah, $48,000; and at Westmont, $48,900. In 2003, the full professor at Westmont was earning $68,700; at Messiah, $65,100; and at Eastern, $68,500.

Nor does any of this seem to be a fluke. "Christian elementary and secondary schools, home schooling, and youth ministries are all thriving," reported The Chronicle of Higher Education in a feature story in 1999, and they have provided a potent market for Christian higher education recruiting. Christian higher education has also developed more sophisticated marketing tools, and it has benefited from the increasing perception that secular and state schools offer little more than non-stop parties and binge drinking. And probably most surprising, Christian higher education has rocketed upwards in terms of academic and intellectual respectability. "Of all America's religious traditions, evangelical Protestantism … ranks dead last in intellectual stature," wrote Boston University sociologist Alan Wolfe in 2000. But when Wolfe visited Wheaton College, he discovered that the students "are as outstanding as any in America," while its faculty "are writing the books, publishing the journals, teaching the students, and sustaining the networks necessary to establish a presence in American academic life." No longer, warned Wolfe, can Americans "write off conservative Christians as hopelessly out of touch with modern American values."2

If news like this made for happiness, then we should be happy indeed. The problem is that it lacks context. The enrollment surge represents a great accomplishment, but its greatness is somewhat diminished by the fact that the total undergraduate enrollment of Christian colleges still amounts to only 1 percent of the 15 million or so students enrolled at colleges and universities across the United States. Institutional membership in the Council of Christian Colleges and Universities stands at an all-time high of 130, but that amounts to less than 4 percent of the 3,600 colleges and universities in the United States—and at a time when self-identified evangelical Protestants number over 20 million Americans and comprise 7 percent of the population.3 In other words, only one in seven evangelical Christians is likely to attend a Christian college, although these institutions could—and statistically should—correspondingly carry three times as many as they do. Places like Indiana Wesleyan report enrollments of over 10,000 students; but 70 percent of Indiana Wesleyan's students are part of its off-campus College of Adult and Professional Studies. Fully a quarter of the CCCU colleges and universities enroll fewer than a thousand students; fully a third enroll less than a thousand full-time undergraduates.

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