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It's not merely that the pool of students is disappointingly small. Christian higher education also has to compete with secular campuses where various Christian ministries have carved out "safe" spaces for Christian students. The success of Campus Crusade for Christ, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, and church-related college-age organizations around the country on secular campuses has undermined a major rationale for attending a Christian college or university. So long as Harvard, Dartmouth, or Penn State could be portrayed as quicksands of secularism, Christian colleges had an important trade-off to offer student recruits: the Ivies may offer a more prestigious education, but they'll smother your spiritual life, and what will it profit a bright kid if he gains a Harvard MBA but loses his soul? Yet today at Harvard, "there are probably more evangelicals than at any time since the 17th century," says Peter J. Gomes, the minister of Harvard's Memorial Church, and certainly no part of an evangelical himself. As Harvard expanded enrollments in the 1970s and 1980s, that "meant that a lot of Midwestern white-bread Protestant Christian evangelicals at whom Harvard would never have looked in the past, and who would have never looked at Harvard, suddenly became members of the university." Evangelical students venturing into deepest, darkest Cambridge will still find more than enough hostility to Christianity to challenge their faith; but they'll also find the Harvard-Radcliffe Christian Fellowship, the Asian-American Christian Fellowship, RealLife Boston, or Park Street Church's Friday evening prayer fellowship in Emerson Hall. Campus Crusade alone has 27,000 staffers on 1,000 American college and university campuses. And as they grow, such ministries reduce the sense of threat and exposure evangelical students have to feel on secular campuses—and reduce, also, one of the major incentives for coming instead to a Christian college.4

Size, of course, is not a moral quality, so maybe I'm putting our attention on the wrong category. But acceptance rates may be moral qualities, since acceptance rates are generally understood as a good measure of how picky a college can afford to be, which in turn is supposed to indicate how stable (and tuition-proof) its financial position is. By that standard, not many of the Christian colleges enjoy much fiscal stability. For instance: according to the 2002 Peterson's Christian Colleges and Universities, Huntington College accepted 650 new students in 2001—but this was almost 95 percent of those who applied, and only a third of the 219 who actually enrolled had graduated in the top 10 percent of their high school graduating class. This suggests that Christian colleges are enormously eager to take whatever students sign up—which suggests, in turn, that they do so because, like the airlines, they cannot afford too many empty seats: Christian higher education is so dangerously tuition-dependent that it can't be too picky about the caliber of student it enrolls. We apologize for this by reasoning that our educational philosophy is one of ministry, and ministry doesn't turn people away. On the other hand, that type of student tends to be much more expensive to educate (for reasons I'll come to in a minute); so even when increases in enrollment improve revenues, they also increase costs. As Melissa Morris-Olson wrote in 1997, "increased enrollments in colleges and universities have not necessarily resulted in improved financial conditions."5 And the reason is that we are filling those seats with high-maintenance students.

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