A new report by the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance found that Jewish undergraduate enrollment at Harvard University has fallen to about 7 percent in 2025, its lowest level since before World War II and the lowest among Ivy League schools with reliable data, reported JNS.
The report, titled “Jewish Enrollment at Harvard and Its Peers, 1967-2025: A Narrowing Gate," examined nearly six decades of data from Hillel International, historical surveys conducted by The Harvard Crimson, and reporting from peer institutions.
According to the analysis, the proportion of Jewish undergraduates at Harvard has declined by roughly half over the past decade. The current figure is less than a third of the approximately 25 percent average recorded in the late 20th century.
The report compared trends across nine elite universities and examined several commonly cited explanations for changes in enrollment patterns, including geographic diversification, expanded financial aid, growth in international students and athletic recruitment.
The authors concluded that none of those factors fully explain the sharper decline in Jewish enrollment at Harvard compared to its peer institutions.
The report also noted that Harvard publicly tracks detailed demographic data on race, gender and income, but does not systematically track religion or Jewish students in its admissions data.
The alumni association is urging Harvard to begin voluntarily collecting data on Jewish self-identification, commission an independent review of its admissions process, and take corrective measures if policies are found to disproportionately affect Jewish applicants.
Harvard, like other universities in the US, has seen an uptick in anti-Israel activity since Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel and the war in Gaza which followed. The university has come under fire over its handling of antisemitism on campus.
The Trump administration has taken several steps against Harvard University in the wake of its failure to handle growing antisemitism on campus, including a freeze of more than $2 billion in federal research funding.
Trump later announced that Harvard University had agreed to pay $500 million and operate trade schools as part of a deal with the administration, but that deal did not come to fruition.
Responding to the latest report on Jewish enrollment, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) said the report highlights concerns that have been raised in congressional hearings about antisemitism on campus, including her questioning of then-Harvard president Claudine Gay in 2023.
“I strongly believe the antisemitism does not just impact students on campus at Harvard; it shapes admission," Stefanik said.
Gay courted controversy starting with her initial response to the Hamas massacre of October 7, including her initial refusal to condemn the worst massacre of the Jewish people since the Holocaust or the 34 Harvard student groups that published a statement in the immediate aftermath of the massacre, blaming Israel for the Hamas massacre.
The antisemitism controversy later came to a head when Gay, along with MIT President Sally Kornbluth and University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill, testified before a congressional hearing, headed by Stefanik, which dealt with the issue of antisemitism on college campuses.
All three university presidents gave similar answers to Stefanik in which they failed to unequivocally condemn antisemitism or even calls for genocide against Jews.
In response to a question about whether such calls for genocide violate Harvard's code of conduct, Gay responded that this depended on the "context" and whether or not the genocidal language turned into action.