Are there any? How are they treated? Why would they choose BYU? (Just cogitating, pursuant to reading that BYU might not be welcome in the Big 12 due to being perfused with homophobia.)

I knew a few non-members while at BYU. Most were foreign students, and I have no clue why they went there. I think their parents wanted to send them to a conservative school in the U.S., and they knew nothing about the Mormons. One of them ended up getting baptized...maybe just for reduced tuition. That was one of the few convert baptisms I've seen since moving to Utah.

How much of a reduction is there if you are "of the body"? My inlaws have put a number of kids in school there, and as non-residents, I have no idea how they can pay, unless it is heavily subsidized.

2016-2017 tuition for LDS students is $2,650 per semester. Non-LDS tuition is $5,300 per semester.

I had (still have) a good friend was was catholic. She chose BYU because it was a good school in her field, and was introduced to the school when one of her parents was a visiting professor.

She loved her professors, and BYU as a school. However, she is now ashamed to have BYU on her resume because of the way they treat rape victims.

While she was there, she was constantly dealing with unwanted proselytizing, people saying bigoted things about non-LDS people, standard misogyny, and repeated situations where she felt like people who she thought were real friends apparently just had an agenda to change or convert her. Also, a general lack of boundaries that she found shocking as a non-LDS feminist from out of state. I gotta say, she was (is) a bad ass when someone steps on her boundaries. And she didn't care if it was a professor. She didn't hesitate to get into with them.

Once she moved away from Utah, she never wanted to step foot in the the state again.

Boy, that must be hard. Through thick and thin, I have always been proud to own my alma maters. Or should I be pretentious as only befits a UC Berkeley graduate studying Latin and say almae matres? :)

Sometimes the UC system policies and practices are sucky, but never as bad as BYU. Sad.

We had some nevermo's at Ricks in '66-'67. The ones I knew were on full load athletic scholarships. They attended the requisite religion classes and kept their noses clean. I guess they had more at stake than I did. The three guys I'm thinking of all went on to long careers in education.

RB



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/31/2016 07:02PM by Lethbridge Reprobate.

So a lot of the people on the publicly visible teams are nevermos?

How about former-non-mo's?

A local high school kid was a "top prospect" baseball player. His dad had coached local little league (my son't team, which included this kid, and with me as assistant coach, as they're the same age), and then the high school team when his son got to high school.
They were all never-mo's.

Then the kid got a scholarship offer to BYU to play baseball. They knew of it, but not much about it. He didn't get any other offers from "big" schools, and didn't get drafted in the pro draft, so they took the BYU scholarship.

After his first year there, he came home and announced to his parents that he wanted to convert to mormonism.
His dad called me, as he knew (from our time coaching) I was an ex-mo. I was brutally honest with him about the church's factual issues and the nonsense they spew. He thanked me for filling him in. Said it sounded pretty nuts, but not all that harmful, and as his son was now 18, there wasn't anything he could really do to stop him anyway.

I didn't hear anything from or about them for about 6 months. Then I hear that the kid and the whole family were baptized.
They're attending the local ward.

The latest news I have is that the dad (but none of the rest of the family, mom, a daughter, and the kid at BYU) has gone inactive. Less than a year after joining. Apparently he missed his beer too much, got caught sneaking a brewski with the fellas, and sorta "blew up" about the mormons.

Life is funny. :)

Well, no doubt he is a happier man! He should have listened...

I knew two students at BYU who were Non-Mormon. The first was in my dorm and came to BYU because her boyfriend was LDs and on a mission. She roomed with her boyfriend's sister. She and the boyfriend parted ways but she met another LDS lad at BYU and was soon engaged. He ended-up baptizing and then marrying her.

The second was a foreign student whose parents wanted her in as straight laced a school as they could find because she was a hell raiser. She was one of the smartest people in the class I attended with her but she had no intention of joining tscc. Have no idea what became of her.

Jim McMahon

Yea, half the people in the popular college sports.

The ballroom dance program drew 2 nevermos from my small high school in the deep south. I transferred there later and never ran into them. They both stayed nevermos. :)

There were quite a few Muslim students there. One guy in our apartment was from Kosovo--not really religious. He'd go to church with us--probably to meet girls or something. He was an exchange student, who was living with a Mormon family in Washington, and he went to BYU along with one of the sons. For him, I think it wasn't a good fit, and he transferred to the University of Washington after a year.

There were a group of Jordanians in the apartment below us, who were BYU students. There were also a few Palestinians in some of my classes. That made for good diversity in the discussions about Middle East politics, so their presence was important. I guess some of the Muslim parents think BYU is the place with...ugh..."standards" closest to what's acceptable in their homes.

Then there was the guy next door on the football team who decided to get baptized while at BYU. It was a big to do: capacity crowd, member of the presiding bishopric, etc.

When I attended the Zoo back in the 1960s, about 5% of the students were non-Mo. Now the figure I am hearing is 1%.

Back in the mid 60s, I knew of a pretty significant smattering of noMos among athletes, the Honors Program, and among graduate students. Come to think about it, every noMo that I recall was in one of those three groups.

In my first attempt at going to college, I went to that place in Provo, fall 1967. You know, "The campus is our world". I got into a new apartment with a neighbor/friend who was in the same ward in Sandy. He also invited another guy from school and I learned to you don't ever room with friends.

This was a 2 bedroom apartment with 3 guys in each, and in the other one was a distant cousin of the other kid from school, and another guy who was already an RM and about 25 years old. He was a pilot with the National Guard and took me on my first ever plane ride, over Utah county. Scared me a lot when he started diving towards the ground.

The last guy was a non-mo from Maryland, named Buddy Bare. His dad, also a non-mo, had dealt with some Mormons over his life, at work IIRC, but was never a member. I guess Buddy had been a problem boy in high school, got in trouble with the police and ...gasp...girls.

He thought sending Buddy to BYU would straighten him out and make him be a good boy. That didn't work. Buddy didn't come home for days on end, and you know he wasn't at the library. He drank a lot, don't know how he got beer since he wasn't 21 either, but I honestly don't remember the details, and am surprised that I still remember his name. Wonder what ever happened to him.

I didn't go back to school after the first semester.


**EDIT** After I posted this, I googled his name and found out that he died last year in Maryland, so I guess he ended up there. He has a Facebook page and even though I wouldn't have known him on the street, the Facebook pictures look just like he looked in 1967, except older.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/01/2016 03:49PM by memikeyounot.

I started there in Fall of '67!

I think I remember seeing you! You walked upright and were clean shaven, right? We may have had a class together. I was the Mexican with the visible garment hems, who never got turned down for a date.

Ah, yes, the power of positively wearing your garments!

Thanks everyone for the responses. Fascinating. I know two nevermo kids thinking of going there, but they have no idea what the place might have in store for them. They are just thinking it's a state where the skiing is awesome. At least they are hetero...one less pitfall.