The Professor Scoring Christian Colleges on Their Own Claims

A university can put "Christian" in its name and mean almost nothing by it. That's the uncomfortable premise behind a book a Baylor University researcher has spent years building, and it's also the argument Andy Gammons, Taylor University's executive director of admissions, brought to a Students Incorporated interview taped in early 2025: in a shrinking market for college applicants, schools doubling down on a specific identity are outlasting the ones trying to please everyone.

Gammons, a 1999 Taylor graduate four years into running the admissions office, appeared alongside Tyler Smith, his student intern and a Taylor marketing major, for an episode built around one question: what actually makes a college or university great. Their answer kept circling back to one idea, in Gammons' own shorthand. "Nobody wants to buy vanilla," he said. "Vanilla is a very hard flavor to sell. You like vanilla? Most people don't like vanilla. Taylor University is not a vanilla institution."

A Scale From Zero to 28

The book Gammons kept referencing on air is "Christian Higher Education: An Empirical Guide," published by Baylor professor Perry Glanzer along with co-authors Theodore Cockle and Jessica Martin. Rather than take a college's self-description at face value, Glanzer's team built what they call the Operationalizing Christian Identity Guide, a rubric scoring hundreds of Christian and Catholic colleges across North America on whether faith commitments actually show up in hiring, curriculum, chapel requirements, and mission statements, not just marketing copy. Gammons described the scale as running roughly zero to 28 and said he has bought and handed out 50 copies of the book, calling it essential reading for families who assume every school with a religious-sounding name delivers a similar experience.

The book's own findings back up why he thinks that assumption is dangerous. According to reporting from Biola University and the Christian Scholar's Review, Glanzer's team evaluated 562 Christian colleges and universities in North America and found Biola scored highest of all of them for making faith central to its identity, curriculum, and policies. Gammons offered a blunter example on the podcast: Texas Christian University, he said, carries the word "Christian" in its own name but "is not a Christian university and maybe hasn't been for a long, long time," and might not even claim to be one anymore.

That gap between a school's name and its mission isn't new, or unique to smaller religious colleges. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Dartmouth were founded to train Protestant clergy: Harvard was chartered in 1636 to educate ministers for the Puritan colonies, and Yale was founded in 1701 partly because Congregationalist pastors thought Harvard had already drifted too far from orthodoxy. The drift became the norm: Harvard's board fell under Unitarian control by 1805, and mandatory chapel, once universal at elite universities, disappeared at Brown in 1959 and Princeton in 1964. The pattern Glanzer is measuring at smaller Christian colleges played out at the Ivy League two centuries earlier, compressed into a shorter timeline and made newly urgent by a shrinking applicant pool.

Why Identity Became a Business Strategy

That shrinking pool is the backdrop behind Gammons' "vanilla" comment. Every incoming class from here forward is smaller than the last, a consequence of falling birth rates after the 2008 recession working through the college pipeline. For schools built around a specific religious identity, the math compounds: fewer high schoolers overall, a smaller share identifying as Christian, and a smaller share still able to afford a private religious education. Pew Research Center's 2025 Religious Landscape Study found that just 45% of Gen Z adults identify as Christian, down from a clear majority a generation earlier, even as the national decline in Christian identification has leveled off in the past five years. For a recruiting pool that already skews smaller by definition, that's not a rounding error.

The Council for Christian Colleges and Universities has watched that pressure split its members rather than produce a uniform decline: some posted record enrollment in 2024, part of a broader post-pandemic rebound, while others have closed outright, including Eastern Nazarene College and, as of a November 2025 announcement, Trinity Christian College, which cited declining enrollment, shrinking donor support, and post-COVID financial strain. CCCU research on its own closed member schools found that in the years before shutting down, those colleges had already seen income fall by roughly 35% and enrollment drop by 78% on average, a slide that typically started long before the closure made headlines.

Gammons framed the split he sees industry-wide as a choice, not an accident. Some institutions responded to the shrinking pool by broadening their appeal, softening their identity to court students outside their original mission. "That has not done very well for most people," he said. The schools holding steady took the opposite approach, "honing in on the brand": explicit about mission and values even when clarity narrows the applicant pool, on the theory that a smaller, genuinely interested group beats a larger, lukewarm one.

Taylor's own numbers are the case Gammons makes for that bet paying off. He cited a 99% "success rate," students employed or in graduate school within six months of graduation, against a national average he put at 85%, and a 93% "excellence rate" for graduates working full-time specifically in their intended field, against a national figure of roughly 56%. The school was also rated the third-happiest student body in the country by the Princeton Review that year, a data point Gammons connected directly to self-selection: students who show up already know, and want, what Taylor is.

Nobody wants to buy vanilla.

What "No Surprises" Looks Like in Practice

Smith's own account of choosing Taylor was less about data than about an admissions philosophy Gammons calls avoiding "service fall-off": making sure a student's experience never drops in quality once they've committed. Smith remembered his campus tour guide learning his name, asking what he liked to do rather than reciting a script, and praying for him at the end of the visit. He stayed overnight through a program called "24 at Taylor," sleeping in his older brother's dorm room and talking with hallmates who had just met him. He came back to his Bangkok high school with what he called "junioritis," a restlessness to already be somewhere else. Gammons' summary doubles as a warning against overselling to fill seats: "The worst thing that can happen is a surprise." A student who arrives underwhelmed means the admissions office oversold; one pleasantly surprised means it undersold. Either way, he said, the goal is a picture accurate enough that nothing about campus life comes as a shock.

The Students Weighing In Are Already Living the Trade-off

The episode's second half turned the same question over to a panel of the show's own team members, several mid-application themselves. Their answers landed closer to Gammons' "fit" argument than to any ranking system: Toto named sports and community, in that order, as what matters most in a college experience, and a fellow panelist called a strong sense of belonging "a home away from home." Elsa, a Taiwanese citizen applying to universities in Taiwan from abroad, described navigating a country-specific portal and choosing between liberal-arts and science tracks, while Maddie made the case for small classes that let her build real relationships with professors. Asked where they research schools, the group named U.S. News, niche.com, and college websites first, then admitted informal sources, Reddit, YouTube campus vlogs, direct messages to current students, often told them more about a school's real texture than any official page could.

None of them used Glanzer's language or Gammons' vanilla metaphor, but they were describing the same test: not which school ranks highest, but which one is honestly, specifically itself, and whether that matches what they're looking for. For a sector where the pool of applicants keeps shrinking and the cost of guessing wrong keeps rising, that turns out to be the harder, and more durable, thing to get right.

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