Yeshiva University Enrollment Rises Amid Ongoing War in Gaza

Yeshiva University is welcoming more undergraduates to campus this fall than it has in the past 15 years, university officials say.

The number of transfer students to the modern Orthodox Jewish institution in New York City increased by a whopping 75 percent last spring semester, according to campus officials. The university also received the highest number of undergraduate applications in its history in the last academic year, and the wait list is twice as long this year as last. University data shows 2,185 full-time undergraduates attended last spring, compared to 2,033 in spring 2023.

Yeshiva leaders say the most recent growth is at least partially related to the pro-Palestinian protests that have roiled campuses across the country amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. According to media reports, some Jewish students who might otherwise have considered a secular college—or who attended one last year—now perceive those campuses as hostile environments, where they’re bound to encounter antisemitism.

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Rabbi Ari Berman, Yeshiva’s president, said students aren’t concerned about encountering those challenges on his campus, which has helped to set the university apart.

“They want to be in a university that nourishes their identity, that is value-based [and] that offers academic excellence, where they don’t need to be worried about what’s happening in the campus climate, and they actually felt they could focus on their studies and their growth,” said Berman. He emphasized that the university’s enrollment started increasing before the war; notably, the graduate student population has doubled over the last six years, from roughly 2,000 to 4,000 students, which Berman attributes in part to the introduction of new master’s programs, including in artificial intelligence. But he believes recent tensions on other campuses have “accentuated our distinction and accelerated our growth.”

Berman said some transfer students come from Ivy League and other highly selective institutions, including the University of Pennsylvania, Barnard College and Columbia University.

One recent transfer is Ethan Oliner, who previously attended Cornell University. He told ABC7 that he transferred to Yeshiva in the spring because he no longer felt at ease on Cornell’s campus in upstate New York. Last October, staff from Cornell’s Hillel, a Jewish support organization, temporarily urged Jewish students to avoid its kosher dining hall because of violent online threats to the building and Jews on campus.

“After Oct. 7, every time I walked into class, it felt like someone was giving you a dirty look,” said Oliner, who was a member of the executive board of Cornellians for Israel and the head of Kedma, a student group that runs Orthodox prayer services.

Leonard Saxe, who directs the Steinhardt Social Research Institute and Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis University, said he isn’t surprised by Yeshiva University’s enrollment uptick in the wake of recent protests.

“Parents, grandparents, families of college students are very concerned about the safety and well-being of their students,” he said. “Parents are involved and concerned in a way that is a new development.”

The Broader Landscape

Yeshiva isn’t the only institution that has drawn Jewish students wary of their other options.

Brandeis University, a secular institution founded by the Boston-area Jewish community in 1948, extended its transfer deadline last spring “due to the current climate on many campuses around the world,” Brandeis president Ron Liebowitz wrote in a letter to the campus community. Last October, Franciscan University of Steubenville offered expedited transfer to Jewish students, as did Walsh University, another Catholic institution in Ohio.

Touro University, founded in New York City to serve the Jewish community, enrolled about 5,000 undergraduates last year and expects a roughly 10 percent increase in enrollment this fall, said President Alan Kadish. The university’s undergraduate population is roughly 80 percent Jewish, while its graduate schools, like Yeshiva’s, are religiously diverse.

Kadish said it’s hard to say for sure why new students are coming in larger numbers. University officials’ conversations with Jewish day school guidance counselors and principals suggest that “most students who’ve been accepted to elite colleges are still going—they understand the challenges, and they’re still going,” he said.

But multiple transfer students to Touro have told university staff they left their old institution because they no longer felt comfortable there. Transfer students account for about half of the university’s expected growth this year; typically, they make up closer to 40 percent, according to Kadish.

“We want to make Touro a place that can accommodate everybody but particularly make Jewish students feel comfortable,” he said.

Saxe said institutions founded by Jewish communities, including Brandeis, have a lot to offer Jewish students, but he’s disturbed by the idea that some students feel their options are limited.

“I think Brandeis would be a great place for students to come. Yeshiva has some very fine, fine programs,” he said. “But I also believe that for Jews in America, it would be a step backward were there only to be a certain number of schools that were safe and welcoming places for Jewish students”—or even if they were merely perceived that way, especially in light of the history of quotas that once limited Jewish students’ access to some universities.

Congressional hearings on campus antisemitism put a spotlight on the Ivies; the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard and, most recently, Columbia University resigned in the wake of intense questioning by lawmakers. But Saxe says they’re not “the most important front” in battling campus antisemitism; he’s more concerned about Jewish students shying away from large, more accessible public universities. For example, the University of Florida reports enrolling at least 6,000 Jewish students—a bigger Jewish population than any of the Ivies, he said. Such options are also often the most affordable at a time when costs loom large in students’ college decisions.

Yeshiva University may be the right fit for some undergraduates, particularly those from Orthodox backgrounds, Saxe said, but “we need to fix this problem across the board.”

The Costs of Growth

Yeshiva leaders are pleased by the new growth, but it also comes with new costs.

The university added new housing last spring to accommodate the influx of transfers from other colleges, as well as students who abruptly left Jewish educational institutions in Israel during the war. (High school graduates in some Orthodox communities often take a gap year to study Jewish texts at yeshivas or seminaries, often in Israel.)

Yeshiva has also been working to hire more faculty members, including some Jewish and pro-Israel professors who have left other campuses, Berman said.

For example, Yeshiva’s new dean, Rebecca Cypess, left Rutgers University, where she was a music professor and the associate dean of academic affairs for the university’s Mason Gross School of the Arts. She wrote in the Jewish magazine Tablet that she thought Rutgers had drifted away from fostering “free inquiry and respect for diverse opinions within constructive bounds.”

Mauricio Karchmer, a former Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer science professor, also joined Yeshiva’s faculty in February after resigning a few months earlier. He reportedly wrote in his resignation letter that he couldn’t teach students who condemned his “Jewish identity” or his “support for Israel’s right to exist in peace with its neighbors.”

Berman said the university also needs to provide more scholarship dollars, and some donors have stepped in to contribute. Billionaire Robert Kraft, who pulled support from Columbia in the spring, donated $1 million to Yeshiva earlier this summer to support incoming transfer students.

Still, “the needs are so great,” Berman said.

Kadish, of Touro, believes his university might come up against similar challenges. He said expected enrollment this fall is “a number we can handle,” but if the upward trend continues, the university will need to take some capacity-building measures next year.

“We’re pleased with the increased numbers of students,” Kadish said, but “before much more, we would indeed have to gear up, physically, in terms of additional resources.” The university has “contingency plans” in the event that happens.

“The atmosphere on other college campuses is complex, and it’s hard to tell how it’s going to sort out,” he said. “I think if there’s another year of discomfort similar to last year, next year we may see even more of a trend.”

Berman said Yeshiva’s enrollment growth is a sign that the university is fulfilling its mission.

“It’s moments like these that you see Yeshiva University was established to be a source of excellence and a vehicle in which students can come and bring out their best selves,” Berman said.