Religious connections of university students: comparisons between bachelor’s and licentiate’s programs

ABSTRACT The current context of higher visibility of religious manifestations in the public sphere, and mainly in the Educational field, compelled us to establish relations between different religious attachments and formative itineraries within the university, focusing the comparison between students of bachelor’s and licentiate’s programs. The data were collected from a sample of 385 students from Universidade Federal do Paraná [Federal University of Paraná], through a survey. We analyzed the students’ declaration of religious links, the attendance to religious group(s) in 2018 and their institutional religious affiliation. More than a third of the respondents - 38% - claimed to have some type of religious attachment, being predominant the links with Christian religions; the majority declared their adherence to Catholicism, followed by the Evangelical religions. There is, also, an expressive number of students without any religious affiliation, the “non-religious” people. Among the bachelor’s degree students who declared to be religious, most of them are Catholics, followed by the Evangelicals, with relatively equal distribution between Evangelicals of Mission and Pentecostals. The students’ religious attendance suffers little modification after going to college. We highlight the fact that the licentiate’s degree students engage more actively with their faith communities in comparison with their bachelor’s degree colleagues.