Do Orthodox Jews Go to College?

People who learn I'm an Orthodox mother from Brooklyn tend to assume one of two things: either nobody in my world goes to college, or we're all doctors and lawyers. Both are wrong. The honest answer is that it depends entirely on which Orthodox community you're asking about — and "Orthodox Jews" covers a lot of ground. My own kids went in two completely different directions, and both were perfectly normal where we live. So let me walk you through it the way I'd explain it to a neighbor.

Modern Orthodox: College Is Expected

In Modern Orthodox families, higher education is treated the way most upper-middle-class American families treat it — expected, planned for, and celebrated. I have cousins on that side of the family, and the conversation around the Shabbos table isn't whether the kids will go to college, it's which one and what they'll study.

Yeshiva University in New York is the flagship — an Orthodox Jewish university that pairs serious secular academics with Torah study under one roof — and Stern College, its women's division, carries the same prestige. Plenty of Modern Orthodox kids also head to the Ivies, top state schools, and elite professional programs, and graduate degrees in law, medicine, business, and academia are routine.

One thing that surprises outsiders: most of them take a gap year in Israel first. Before college comes a year (sometimes two) of intensive Torah study at a yeshiva or seminary, and only then the undergraduate degree. Nobody sees a contradiction between that year of learning and the medical school that follows. In this community, educational achievement runs high, and it produces doctors, lawyers, engineers, professors, and entrepreneurs at rates that match or beat the general population.

Yeshivish: Growing but Complicated

The Yeshivish world — my world — is where it gets more layered. The traditional path is years of post-high-school yeshiva learning, often until 22 to 25, and then either continued study in kollel or going out to work. College was never the default; Torah learning was, and still is, the thing.

But here's what's shifted. Once you're paying yeshiva tuition for six kids, somebody in the house needs a parnassah, and that math has changed a lot of minds in one generation. So you see more people going for degrees now — usually through programs built for our community, like Touro, online courses, or community colleges with evening and weekend schedules that work around davening and family. Just as common are the routes that skip the four-year degree altogether: a CPA, nursing, IT certifications, a real estate license. My sister-in-law's husband is in kollel, and she went and got her nursing degree — she's the breadwinner, and nobody blinks at that.

The tension underneath all of it is real, and I won't pretend otherwise. The community treasures Torah learning and genuinely worries that a secular campus will chip away at a young person's observance. The compromise most families have landed on is the community-friendly institution — a place that grants a real degree inside a framework that respects how we live.

Hasidic: Not Traditional College — But the Picture Is Changing

Most Hasidic men don't attend a traditional college or university. The path there runs through religious study from early childhood straight into adulthood, and the place of secular subjects in Hasidic schools varies enormously — some give a solid grounding in English and math, others keep secular instruction to a minimum. That's no small matter; it's one of the most publicly argued-over issues in the Hasidic world right now, and New York State has been pressing for stronger secular standards in Hasidic yeshivos.

But the picture really is changing, and you can see it on the ground in Brooklyn. A neighbor's son just finished an HVAC program, and that kind of vocational track — CDL licensing, electrical, plumbing — is everywhere now. So are community-oriented degree programs like Touro and COPE (a Brooklyn vocational and career-training institute serving the frum community), which build their schedules and environment around how Hasidic students live. In a lot of Hasidic communities the women out-earn the degrees too: seminary, then professional training in teaching, therapy, or business. And tech bootcamps aimed specifically at our community have popped up around Brooklyn and beyond.

So What About the Numbers?

People always want a clean statistic here, and I have to be honest that the clean statistic doesn't really exist. Pew's surveys of Jewish Americans have found that Orthodox Jews as a whole complete college at lower rates than other Jewish denominations — but "Orthodox as a whole" lumps together my Modern Orthodox cousins, who are heavily degreed, with Hasidic communities where a traditional degree is rare. Average those two together and the number tells you almost nothing.

The internal variation is the real story, and that part I can tell you from living it. A Chabad Hasid is more likely to have a degree than a Satmar Hasid. A Yeshivish woman is more likely to have one than a Yeshivish man. The gap isn't between Orthodox and everyone else — it's between one Orthodox community and the next.

Why This Is Worth Knowing

If you ever find yourself interviewing someone from my world who doesn't have a degree on their resume, here's what I'd want you to understand. That person may have spent ten or more years in intensive Talmud study — a kind of close textual and dialectical reasoning that many people compare to legal training, arguing a case from every angle, holding several positions in your head at once. It's not a degree, but don't mistake the absence of one for an absence of analytical horsepower.

A non-traditional educational background doesn't tell you a thing about someone's intelligence or capability. The graduates coming out of community-specific programs like Touro and COPE are professionally competent and grounded in a world with deep roots. And whatever you may have read, the direction here is toward more education, not less — partly because tuition bills don't pay themselves, and partly because each generation is a little more open than the one before.

If you want to see where all of this starts, it helps to understand how the Orthodox education system works from the early years, and what people actually mean when they say yeshiva.