The ad says American is a ‘place where Jewish students feel at home’
American University is recruiting Jewish students through an ad in a Brooklyn-based Jewish newspaper describing the school as a “place where Jewish students feel at home.” The move follows similar efforts from Dartmouth and Brown universities as other Ivies, namely Harvard and Yale, experience declines in their Jewish populations.
American took out the advertisement in the Jewish Press, a weekly newspaper that serves Brooklyn’s Orthodox community. The ad touts American’s A rating on the Anti-Defamation League’s Campus Antisemitism Report Card.
“At American University, Jewish students are an active and valued part of campus life, with vibrant programming through AU Hillel and student organizations,” the advertisement reads.
Dartmouth has also promoted Jewish life on campus. Its admissions office published a Q&A with a Jewish student about Dartmouth Hillel and kosher dining in December in a post geared toward students “thinking about campus Jewish life as a part of [their] college search.” Brown has taken similar steps; the university’s agreement with the Trump administration, struck in July, allows the university to conduct “outreach to Jewish Day School students to provide information about applying to Brown.” University president Christina Paxson has spoken about “doing recruiting in religious day schools” as a way to increase intellectual diversity at Brown.
Harvard and Yale have taken more reticent approaches.
Jewish students at one point comprised 25 percent of Harvard’s student body, but by 2025, the size of the university’s Jewish population had shrunk to between 5 and 10 percent, according to a March 2026 Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance report. The decrease in Harvard’s Jewish population is stark enough that Rabbi Jason Rubenstein, executive director of Harvard Hillel, said his organization has been “publicly raising the alarm” about the problem. In March, however, a spokesman for Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences “rejected broader assertions that Harvard had recently increased outreach to Jewish day schools,” the Harvard Crimson reported.
At Yale, just 9.5 percent of students within the classes of 2024 through 2027 identify as Jewish. That number is lower than the average percentage in the 1940s, when Yale imposed quotas that capped the number of Jewish students on campus, the Washington Free Beacon reported. Roughly 20 percent of the college’s student body identified as Jewish during the 2000s.
The dean of Yale College and the university’s chaplain have nonetheless argued that the school has a “thriving” Jewish community. When asked about the numbers—which came from the university’s own “Religious Diversity at Yale” survey—a spokesman said the poll is meant “to give an overall view of the religious diversity at Yale, not to report on the exact percentage of a particular community.”
Other universities have used the opportunity to reach Jewish students concerned about campus antisemitism. Vanderbilt University and Washington University in St. Louis, for instance, have attempted to bring Jewish students to their institutions.
Vanderbilt chancellor Daniel Diermeier has said that, when prospective students and their families visit campus, “they say this is a great place for Jewish families and for Jewish students to thrive.”
Vanderbilt’s acceptance rate has plummeted to record lows as applications have shot up. Only 2.8 percent of Vanderbilt’s 48,720 regular-decision applicants—and about 4 percent of all applicants—during the 2026 cycle were accepted, bringing the school’s acceptance rate down from 32.8 percent only two decades ago. The university is now just as selective as Ivy League institutions: Though Harvard has not published its 2026 acceptance rate, it admitted about 4.2 percent of 2025 applicants. Yale admitted about 4.2 percent of its applicants in 2026.
Sylvia Mathews Burwell, who served as the director of the Office of Management and Budget and secretary of Health and Human Services during Barack Obama’s presidency, was American University’s president from 2017 to 2024. She is the president of Harvard’s Board of Overseers, one of Harvard’s two governing boards. Harvard announced March 31 that Burwell would join the Harvard Corporation, its other, smaller governing board, beginning July 1. Karen Gordon Mills, who was administrator of the Small Business Administration in the Obama administration, is leaving the Harvard Corporation, so it may look like Harvard is simply swapping out one Obama cabinet official for another one. Notable American University faculty members include a former editor of the Free Beacon, Matthew Continetti, who teaches a course there on American Conservative Political Thought.
The Supreme Court’s 2023 rulings in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina have made some colleges wary of recruiting students based on any racial, ethnic, or religious categories. But the Brown settlement with the Justice Department suggests that providing prospective students with information is permitted.
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