Colleges with the Most Latter-day Saint Students
Updated Sep. 2026
Statistics for the numbers for Latter-day Saint students attending various colleges and universities in the United States and Canada are not readily available. Instead, the list below uses a proxy: the number of Institute classes offered by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints at the Institute of Religion nearest each school.
Number
of Institute classes offered isn't a perfect proxy for the number of LDS students for
various reasons -- as described in footnotes below -- but it's not a terrible indicator, and for most readers this heuristic approach will suffice. Here's the list:
College (City, State): School Enrollment / # Institute Classes Offered Fall 2025 [rank change from '25]
1. BYU (Provo, UT): 37,000 / Many [-]
2. BYU - Idaho (Rexburg, ID): 20,000 / Many [-]
3. BYU - Hawaii (Laie, HI): 2,900 / Many [-]
4. Utah State Univ. (Logan, UT): 20,300 / 162 [↑1]
5. Utah Valley Univ. (Orem, UT): 29,000 / 140 [↓1]
6. Weber State Univ. (Ogden, UT): 24,000 / 111 [↑1]
7. Univ. of Utah (Salt Lake City, UT): 32,000 / 100 [↓1]
8. Utah Tech Univ. (St. George, UT): 11,700 / 59 [↑4]
9. Southern Utah Univ. (Cedar City, UT): 12,200 / 55 [↑2]
10. Arizona State Univ. (Tempe, AZ): 51,000 / 41 [↓2]
(t) Snow College (Ephraim, UT): 4,300 / 41 [-]
12. Southern Virginia Univ. (Buena Vista, VA): 1,000 / 24 [-]
13. College of Eastern Idaho (Idaho Falls, ID): 2,300 / 21 [↑1]
(t) Univ. of Calgary (Calgary, AB): 33,000 / 21 [↑1]
15. Boise State Univ. (Boise, ID): 24,000 / 20 [↓7]
16. Univ. of Alberta (Edmonton, AB): 35,000 / 20 [↓2]
17. Univ. of Arizona (Tucson, AZ): 42,000 / 16 [↑2]
18. Chandler-Gilbert Community College (Chandler, AZ): 13,000 / 15 [-]
(t) Idaho State Univ. (Pocatello, ID): 11,900 / 15 [↑4]
(t) Utah State Univ. - Eastern (Price, UT): 1,600 / 15 [↑1]
21. Eastern Arizona College (Thatcher, AZ): 5,200 / 14 [-]
22. Univ. of Idaho (Moscow, ID): 11,000 / 13 [↑4]
(t) Univ. of Wyoming (Laramie, WY): 8,800 / 13 [-]
24. Washington State Univ. (Pullman, WA): 16,300 / 11 [↓2]
25. Mesa Community College (Mesa, AZ): 11,000 / 10 [-]
26. Oregon State Univ. (Corvallis, OR): 25,300 / 9 [↑10]
(t) Univ. of Lethbridge (Lethbridge, AB): 8,500 / 9 [↑7]
28. UNLV (Las Vegas, NV): 25,000 / 8 [↓1]
(t) Univ. of Oregon (Eugene, OR): 24,000 / 8 [↑5]
30. Northern Arizona Univ. (Flagstaff, AZ): 19,500 / 7 [↓3]
(t) Texas A&M (College Station, TX): 60,000 / 7 [↓3]
32. College of Southern Idaho (Twin Falls, ID): 2,000 / 6 [↓5]
(t) New Mexico State Univ. (Las Cruces, NM): 15,400 / 6 [↑4]
(t) Texas Tech Univ. (Lubbock, TX): 41,000 / 6 [↓5]
(t) Univ. of Texas (Austin, TX): 53,000 / 6 [↑1]
36. Colorado State Univ. (Fort Collins, CO): 28,000 / 5 [↓5]
Dropped below the five class threshold in 2026: Cal. State Univ. - Fresno.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Some notes:
Institute Classes Offered. Above lists the number of LDS Institute classes offered Fall 2025 at the Institute nearest the college campus. While we believe this is the best available metric for determining the size of the LDS student population at a given school, various factors could lead to flaws in this conclusion, including:
- The numbers of Institute classes available for each school were taken from The Church of Jesus Christ's official website at https://myinstitute.churchofjesuschrist.org/findInstitute. That website may contain inaccuracies.
- Some Latter-day Saint students at a college don't register for Institute classes, and some young adults register for Institute classes but don't attend the local college. Schools located in cities with a large population of LDS young adults may have many non-students enrolled in Institute.
- Class sizes vary between Institutes. Thus, a school with fewer Institute classes but with many students in each may have more LDS students than a school with more Institute classes but with fewer students in each. It looks like class size statistics may now be available, and I will update the numbers above with this information in the next few months.
- The BYU schools have no Institute classes. Religious education is included as part of these universities' course offerings, which makes these classes different from Institute. But as nearly all students at BYU schools are LDS and take religion courses, we've put these schools at the top of the list and simply stated "many" for the number of classes. It's likely that schools such as Utah State and Utah Valley have larger LDS populations than BYU-Hawaii, but we made the editorial decision to put the Church-owned schools at the top of the list.
- While traditional classes such as Foundations of the Restoration and Jesus Christ and His Everlasting Gospel are offered at all Institutes, many of the larger Institutes have expanded their offerings of more social classes. For instance, Fall 2025 offerings at Arizona State's Institute included basketball, board/card games, beginning Spanish, and Polynesian dance; Boise State's included an improv workshop, country dancing, pottery, and volleyball; Southern Utah's included a podcast class and couple's night; and Weber State's included "Ranger Company" and "Stage Rage Leadership Co." (not sure what these are, but they come with breakfast!). The list above counts these social classes without serious consideration of whether their inclusion skews the results.
- No school with fewer than 5 institute classes is included, which is admittedly an arbitrary threshold, but one only has so much time to idly research such things while ignoring work emails.
Total School Enrollment. Figures are rounded to the nearest thousand -- smaller colleges to the nearest hundred -- because (1) the precise number is inconsequential to a prospective student, and (2) university enrollment figures are complicated and frequently inaccurate or misleading. When students want to know a school's size, they typically want to know the number of students at the campus, but school enrollment figures don't always distinguish between students that are full time, part time, online only, hybrid, attending at branch campuses, or even "attending" via high school programs. And colleges and the media seem to love reporting the largest attendance figures possible, making some schools on paper look as if they were mid-sided cities when actually they are quaint villages. We've tried to collect our data from the schools' official publications, excluding remote and branch campus students. We won't swear to the accuracy of these enrollment numbers, but they should give a general idea of school size.