As Royal Holloway College has pointed out to me, it's getting creationist students who, because of their "beliefs" are essentially unteachable. I've been through universities four times and what I came out knowing bears little resemblance to my pre-conceived ideas about what I expected to learn before I entered each course.

Has anyone got any reliable statistics for university-level students in Britain and the US concerning professed belief in young-earth creationism (or religion in general)? I say this because I have never actually met a student who is a young-earth creationist in my entire time at Oxford (I am now entering my seventh year of study here), nor do any of my friends who went to other UK universities report having ever encountered one. I've heard Professor Steve Jones talk about how it was simply unheard of to meet them ten or twenty years ago, but it happens today.

I have met one or two students who claim religiosity in some cultural, ephemeral, feel-good sense, and even one who claims belief in god (ironically enough the son of a literature professor who was briefly a fellow of New College alongside Richard in the seventies), but no actual creationists.

Just how big a problem is it?