For most high school seniors, going to a college that bans alcohol and premarital sex, and requires chapel once a week, seems like a raw deal. But the skills students absorb at religious colleges might be giving them an edge in the job market.

Schools with strong faith identities and strict behavioral codes - such as the evangelical Wheaton College outside of Chicago, Brigham Young University and the Catholic Thomas Aquinas College near Los Angeles - are succeeding not despite their religious mission, but because of it. The faith of students at schools like these provides them with an additional perspective on subjects from English literature to environmental studies.

When asked how teaching at a religious college differs from their experience teaching at secular ones, dozens of professors have offered me the same answer: The students here do the work, and they come to class. The students I have observed and interviewed tend to approach their studies with a sense that God is calling them to study hard, to find their vocation.

Susan Bratton, the chair of the environmental studies department at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, who has taught at several Christian and secular universities, puts it bluntly, "One thing I like about schools like Baylor, and Christian institutions generally, is that I don't have kids coming to class stoned at 11 in the morning."

Leaders of religious colleges make these arguments: CEOs won't need to scramble to send employees to business ethics classes when they can hire college graduates who already know them; the armed forces might find more success recruiting from the educated classes because a growing number of religious colleges welcome ROTC in ways that Ivy League schools do not; instead of appointing special committees, hospitals might be able to hire entire staffs of doctors with bioethics backgrounds.

The good news for employers, then, is that enrollment at religious colleges has skyrocketed in the past two decades, and that their academic standards have continued to rise. At the more than 125 evangelical member institutions of the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities, enrollment jumped 67% from 1992 to 2002. Schools affiliated with the Church of Latter-day Saints have also been expanding. BYU added an Idaho campus to its Utah and Hawaii ones, and a new Mormon college was recently established in Virginia. Catholic and Jewish colleges are reporting the same surge in applicants.

The number of students at public and secular private schools, meanwhile, has barely fluctuated.

What's behind the trend? Simple population growth - specifically in evangelical, Mormon and Catholic populations - for one thing. A second, perhaps more telling, reason is that strongly religious students of all stripes often feel unwelcome at secular schools, where their beliefs are often derided in the classroom and their sensibilities are offended by what they regard as the amoral behavior of their peers.

Values clashes on campus

Five years ago, for example, the Student Judiciary at Tufts University near Boston voted to withdraw recognition from the Tufts Christian Fellowship for refusing to let a lesbian run for one of the group's offices, holding that the exclusion violated the school's policy against discrimination.

Similar controversies have since arisen for Christian groups at more than a dozen schools. A decade ago, a Muslim student group at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill was denied recognition because it would not allow non-Muslims to hold office.

But students are not just choosing religious colleges to escape secular environments. Evangelical colleges, for instance, have become more academically rigorous in recent years, as they have left the fringes of American society and joined the mainstream. Whereas once evangelical communities looked with suspicion upon secular learning, including science and some literature, now they have found ways to master it.

What effect will the graduates of these schools have on our society? Though hardly uniform in their beliefs or behaviors, many of these graduates share certain attitudes. On a cultural level, religious college graduates are clearly the vanguard of a more conservative generation. But it is not the conservatism of their parents and grandparents.

While religious students still focus highly on marriage and family, my interviews with hundreds of them reflected more contemporary attitudes on:

• The role of women in society (while arguably taking better account of women's actual goals and desires than more doctrinaire feminist groups do);
   
• Homosexuality. Today's religious college students are more tolerant of gays and lesbians than their past counterparts;
   
• Race. Religious colleges' efforts to redress historic racial inequalities and to overcome the racial tensions that characterized some of their campuses in the past are in earnest. Where some fundamentalists once found a Biblical mandate for racist policies, many of today's religious graduates seek to heal those wounds.

Not religious right's imprint

Religious college graduates today have a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between church and state than either the Religious Right of the '80s, which seemed to want to merge the two, or militant secularists who have added so many bricks to the "wall of separation" that people on one side can't see those on the other.

If their activities during college are any indication - both community service and ROTC programs thrive on these campuses - the graduates of today's religious college are ready to serve. President Bush noted as much during his commencement address at the evangelical Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich.: "By serving a higher calling here or abroad, you'll make your lives richer and build a more hopeful future for our world. You serve as agents of renewal across the earth."

—Naomi Schaefer Riley is an adjunct fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and the author of God on the Quad.