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Notes -
BYU is both highly ranked and quite affordable
I assume you meant to reply to @urquan, since that is who you're quoting. But you're right:
Notre Dame and BYU are far from the only well-respected religious university in the U.S. Notre Dame is far from the only well-respected Catholic university in the U.S. Georgetown is technically Catholic, Marquette and Gonzaga and Loyola as well. They don't seem to care much about homosexual conduct though, as far as I can tell.
Southern Methodist... it's in the name. Pepperdine is affiliated with the Church of Christ. Pepperdine as well as Baylor (Baptist) have codes of conduct that exclude homosexual sex, though they otherwise seem happy to use progressive-approved language in discussing sexual identitarianism. I have no idea how serious they are about enforcement, though.
But most of the schools I just named are "top 100 national universities" in the US News rankings.
That's a fair summary.
And BYU is another university like Notre Dame that strikes me as quite willing to compromise on values for tuition money, though I understand they do have a large student population that is practicing LDS. My mind skips BYU sometimes because I'm not from that part of the country and have no connections to the Mormon community; but my understanding is it's right on the edge between being a relatively prestigious university and being a finishing school for the children of elite LDS members. And I didn't even realize Georgetown was historically Catholic -- and, I mean, Yale and Harvard were historically religous, but no one would confuse them for Bible College.
But to be clear, my point isn't that religious universities are bad — far from it, I have friends and family embedded in religious colleges. My parents met each other at one. But my position is that they're typically worse in comparative terms especially when accounting for the other institutions that are likely to have accepted a particular applicant for admission, when the explicitly religious nature of the college is excluded, and particularly if we're being practical and evaluating public universities in the calculus. I don't include colleges that are willing to sell out their faith for prestige in the definition of a religious institution, especially since they won't be willing to enforce faith standards that are the topic of this discussion. I suppose time will tell whether BYU, Pepperdine, Baylor, and Notre Dame end up sliding more or less in that direction.
Do they? I would have thought they were heavily subsidized.
BYU is absolutely not willing to compromise on values for tuition money and requires a pastor’s letter of recommendation regardless of denomination.
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Given that I can't remember any media frenzies about students being disciplined for having gay sex, I can conclude that the level of enforcement is somewhere between zero and zero.
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BYU is affordable if you are mormon. If you are not, it is not actually a good deal.
It looks like it's 13000 per year for non-Mormons. That's not bad, though there exist other options for similar prices.
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