Ivy League students increasingly identify as LGBT, far outpacing national average
Jeremiah Poff
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Ivy League students are identifying as LGBT at a significantly higher rate than the rest of the population, a new analysis of recent polls shows.
According to a recent Gallup poll, 7.2% of the U.S. adult population identified as “something other than heterosexual,” a significant increase from 3.5% a decade ago. But Ivy League schools have seen the number of LGBT students increase at a much higher rate and exceeding the national percentage.
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Nowhere was this more visible than a recent poll from Brown University that indicated 38% of the student body did not identify as heterosexual. Meanwhile, at Princeton, a student survey showed only 65% of the class of 2023 identified as heterosexual.
At Yale, the Yale Daily News reported that roughly 75% of the student body identified as heterosexual, while 14% said they were bisexual. Harvard students showed similar results, with 71% of incoming freshmen in 2021 identifying as heterosexual and 13% identifying as bisexual.
Josephine Kovecses, a student at Brown University, told the Brown Daily Herald that the rise in students not identifying as heterosexual was due to a more accepting societal attitude toward LGBT identities.
“Queer people haven’t been able to be open in their identifications for that long,” Kovecses said. “So it’s exciting that the numbers are growing and that queer people are able to be open in particular at Brown.”
Terry Schilling, the president of the American Principles Project, told the Washington Examiner in a statement that the increase of students identifying as something besides exclusively heterosexual was due in no small part to cultural pressures that have attached a stigma with being straight. He noted that sexologist Alfred Kinsey attempted to show that a significant number of men have a sexual attraction to other men by pointing to behaviors among prisoners.
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“In 1953, Alfred Kinsey released a controversial report showing that up to 10% of American men had some sort of sexual attraction to other men,” Schilling said. “The study relied heavily on prisoners. Fast forward to today and depending on the group, the numbers of people identifying as LGBTQ have skyrocketed.”
“Elites have essentially made being straight or normal into a stigma, and the social pressure on America’s youth to identify as a sexual minority is enormous,” he said.