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Note: recently there’s been a lot of hullabaloo in various fora about the results of a BYU Studies study that discussed youth retention rates. For what it’s worth, I wrote this post before all that dropped; even though it’s relevant to that theme, this isn’t some kind of a direct response to that back-and-forth.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n I had the privilege of teaching seminary a few years back to 2-3 students (they really cut up those seminary teaching districts finely), one of which was one of those high schoolers whose ambition knows no bounds who\u2019s going to get a triple PhD\/MBA\/MD\/JD\/MFA degree or whatever, so it was great to hear that she had been accepted into Yale. A few years later I ran into her again at a ward function and yes, she was still at Yale and was excited about having just put in her mission papers.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n From one perspective, that isn\u2019t supposed to happen. It\u2019s an old canard in some circles that the Church needs to fundamentally change or it will lose its best and the brightest. This idea actually has an old pedigree. Hugh Nibley recounts an episode where O.C. Tanner <\/span>bemoaned<\/span><\/a> that the Book of Mormon is \u201cdriving the best minds out of the Church.\u201d And then famously Thomas Jefferson prophesied all the youth of his generation would die Unitarians.<\/span><\/p>\n In the more modern iteration seminary students who leave and are exposed to university learning and ideals are supposed to question everything about their cisheteronormative patriarchal colonial upbringing and become activists. (Although the university-to-activist pipeline has had a pretty rough go the past couple of years, for myriad orthogonal reasons we don\u2019t need to go into here).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The thing is, I just don\u2019t see it. Of course, it happens, a lot of people leave, including the youth, including some who are accepted to elite universities, but as a widespread phenomena the idea that the smart people leave, so only the dummies who don\u2019t have a sophisticated take on higher criticism or whatever are left doesn\u2019t seem to pan out. It is probably true that people with more of a social activist-y bent tend to leave, but that\u2019s not synonymous with sophistication, education, or just plain having their stuff<\/em> (Times and Seasons is PG) together. Anecdotally, in my extended family the ones that have their life course ducks in a row tend to be the more church-y ones (Sorry nephew(s) so and so, we love you and I doubt you’re reading this, but you could get off your butt and stop playing video games all day.) Less anecdotally, My <\/span>BYU Studies article<\/span><\/a> on this shows that stayers are actually more educated and wealthier, and Alex Bass\u2019 <\/span>analysis of more recent data<\/span><\/a> has shown the same. More educated, higher paying careers, higher chance of marriage, more children. That doesn\u2019t make the Church’s truth claims valid, of course, or even necessarily establish causality, but trying to blackmail the Church into changing or else the best and the brightest will leave is a self-serving fantasy more than anything.<\/span><\/p>\n