The Impact of Religious Diversity on Students’ Academic and Behavioral Outcomes

This paper explores how religious diversity affects college students’ academic performance and behavior towards members of other religions. Our setting is a secular four-year university located in Lebanon, a country that is deeply divided along religious lines. To identify causal effects, we exploit the university’s random assignment of firstyear students to peer groups. We proxy students’ religious backgrounds by whether they attended secular, Christian or Islamic high schools. We find that exposure to peers from different religious backgrounds increases Muslim students’ enrollment in classes with non-Muslim instructors, suggesting that contact improves openness towards members of other religions. Inter-religious contact also impacts students’ academic performance. We show that while exposure to peers from non-Islamic high schools increases Muslim student GPA, exposure to peers from Islamic backgrounds reduces the GPA among students from secular high schools. These asymmetric effects highlight the heterogeneous academic returns to inter-religious mixing in a divided society.