While just 7% of Americans are LGBTQ+, students at Ivy League universities are identifying as non-straight at rates as much as five times the general public.
Brown University made headlines after a student poll revealed a whopping 38% of their student body is not straight.
“Honestly I’m not surprised by that statistic,” an anonymous senior at Brown University told The Post. “At Brown, there’s no social pressure to fit into a box or hide your identity.”
Other Ivies aren’t far behind. In fact, more than a third of students at Princeton and more than a quarter at Yale and Harvard identify as LGBTQ+, as per recent polling — and campus sources chalk it up, in part, to politics and a desire to join an “oppressed” group.”
According to the Census Bureau, 20% of Gen Z is LGBTQ+, far more than older cohorts. But Ivy League students far outstrip their generation as a whole.
According to Abigail Anthony, who graduated from Princeton University with a degree in politics this year, a progressive and identity-consumed culture on elite campuses could be contributing.
“Since sexual orientation identity is largely non-falsifiable, many people will claim LGBTQ status to join the ‘oppressed’ group,” she told The Post.
According to a Princeton student newspaper survey, 35% of the 2023 graduating class identified as something other than straight.
“It could be that students at elite schools are more inclined to be obsessed with social acceptance and professional advancement, and … profess an LGBTQ identity to indicate their political beliefs on a campus that leans left,” she added.
At schools for which historical data is available, the proportion of students who are not straight is skyrocketing. Brown jumped from 14% in 2010 up to 38% this year.
Some 29% of Yale’s class of 2023 identified as something other than heterosexual when they were surveyed as freshmen in 2019. That’s up from just 15% of the class of 2020 when they were asked by the school paper in 2016.
And the proportion of LGBTQ+ students at Harvard tripled over the last decade, from 10% of incoming freshmen in 2013 to 29% in 2021.
The most recent data from Cornell comes from 2017, when 21.4% of freshmen were LGBTQ+. The University of Pennsylvania is an outlier, at just 15% as of 2022.
Ben Appel, 40, finished his undergraduate degree in 2020 as an adult student at Columbia’s General Studies program. And, although he is gay himself, he said his Gen Z classmates were markedly more likely to identify as “queer.”
“Queer is as much politics as it is a sexual identity. Maybe even more so,” Appel, author of the forthcoming book “Cis White Gay: The Making of a Gender Heretic,” told The Post. “The Ivies have a lot of really privileged kids. I’m sure many are motivated to identify into a so-called marginalized community in order to earn some social cache.”
He thinks a growing number of amorphous labels allow more people to fall under the LGBT umbrella than ever before.
“The ‘trans’ and ‘queer’ umbrellas have expanded to include gender-nonconforming people and even people who would normally be considered straight,” Appel noted.
Anthony agrees: “In some instances, a straight person will identify as bisexual but simply continue dating the opposite sex.”
Although Columbia hasn’t published similar figures, Appel and another Columbia graduate both estimate they are in line with other Ivy League schools.
“It’s becoming a majority,” an anonymous member of Columbia’s class of 2022 observed.
Appel said that Ivy League universities are particularly likely to have curriculum that is fixated on gender and sexuality.
“It makes sense that these polls were taken at Ivy League universities,” he told The Post. “Students take one queer theory course and come out as queer.”
At Princeton this year, 35% of seniors identified as something other than straight, compared with just 25% of incoming freshmen. And nearly one in five Princeton grads this year came out while in college.
Cornell developmental psychology professor and young adult sexuality expert Ritch Savin-Williams believes that Gen Z students are coming out in larger numbers due to increased social acceptance — especially on progressive campuses: “The shift has been in the visibility and the willingness of individuals to express it and to declare it.”
