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The Ivy League's influence also extends to Christian ministries. Graduates include Charles Colson (Brown); David Beckman (Yale), president of Bread for the World; and Gary Haugen (Harvard), president and founder of International Justice Mission.

Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, says, "There's not a week that goes by that I'm not reminded in some very concrete way of what a wonderful education I received at Princeton." He enrolled there in 1965, just when the Ivy League's move toward meritocracy leveled the playing field for students like Land who had the ability, if not the legacy.

The decision to attend Princeton did not come easily for Land, however. His father and teachers lobbied for Princeton's prestige. But his mother and pastor pushed for Wheaton College in Illinois.

"The argument for the Wheaton people was, You can't go into a cold spiritual icebox like Princeton and come out spiritually hot," he recalled. "And the argument on the other side was, You can't go into a hothouse like Wheaton and come out and face the cold wintry blast of the world."

Matt Bennett, founder and president of the Christian Union, an Ivy League ministry based in Princeton, New Jersey, acknowledged that the sometimes-hostile atmosphere precludes moderation. "Faith is either hot or cold in these places," Bennett said. "If it's casual, you'll get swept up. If you're for Christ, you're known for it."

But local churches and parachurch ministries are helping today's Christian students be known for their faith. Land says he is "amazed at how much stronger the evangelical presence appears to be on campus now" than when he attended in the late 1960s.

One reason for this upsurge dates back 40 years. With the Immigration Act of 1965, Congress abolished nationality quotas and ordered that immigrants were to be admitted based on their professions and skills. The bill opened the immigration floodgates for Asian professionals. Nearly 20 years later, the children of these doctors and engineers—many of them Christians from China and Korea—applied to Ivy League colleges. Wanting accomplished and racially diverse student bodies, the Ivy League obliged.

Now, Asians account for nearly 14 percent of Ivy League undergraduates. At Penn, the proportion is almost one-quarter. Asian Americans are the majority of many major Ivy League campus ministries.

Jimmy Quach leads Harvard-Radcliffe Asian American Christian Fellowship (HRAACF), a ministry affiliated with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, an evangelical campus mission. His family fled Vietnam for America at the end of the war in the mid-1970s. He attended Harvard, and graduated in 1998 with majors in economics and applied mathematics. But when he first showed up at Harvard, his faith was nominal. Quach says his Asian church perpetuated the struggles that afflict many young Asian Americans—namely, conditional love based on performance. Harvard seemed to be more of the same, until he ran into HRAACF.

"At Harvard there's a lot of mutual sizing up. Other students ask about your sat score," Quach said. "[HRAACF] was the first group on campus where they didn't ask my score. They just wanted to know me and be friends."

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September 2005, Vol. 49, No. 9