The study, conducted by the Barna Group in collaboration with the Association for Biblical Higher Education, asked parents of prospective students to identify what they consider to be the goals or ultimate purpose of college education.

A new study lends supporting evidence to the theory that a failure of parents to transmit their faith to their children is a factor in the rise of the number of Americans who say they have no particular religious affiliation and identify instead as a group popularly known as religious “nones.”

The study, “Religious/secular distance: How far apart are teenagers and their parents?” authored by Ryan T. Cragun, Joseph H. Hammer, Michael Nielsen, and Nicholas Autzwas published in the journal Psychology of Religion and Spirituality.

In the study, cited by PsyPost, researchers developed a tool called the Nonreligious-Nonspiritual Scale which measures secularity along two spectrums: from nonreligious to highly religious and from nonspiritual to highly spiritual.