Imagine an institution that requires its leaders to attend not only college, but graduate school. Imagine that the graduate school in question is constitutionally forbidden from receiving any form of government aid, that it typically requires three years of full-time schooling for the diploma, that the nature of the schooling bears almost no resemblance to the job in question, and that the pay for graduates is far lower than other professions. You have just imagined the relationship between the Christian Church and her seminaries.
Mainline churches are nearly universal in their requirement that their Priests/Pastors/Ministers/Reverends be seminary graduates, and since seminary is a graduate school, this means the students must first be successful undergraduates. So take all of the arguments about a college bubble and add at least three years of tuition cost and forgone income.
But you’re not quite done: My friend Father Jay Geisler counsels seminary students. He tells me that in his experience roughly half of matriculated students do not graduate within three years. In addition, he tells me that the living costs tend to be higher for seminary students than for undergrads because undergrads are almost never married with children, but seminary students often are. As such, dorm room type accommodations for grads will not do….
Not only that, but students are often told “there may not be a job at the end of all this.” Once the rule used to be, a Bishop did not ordain someone he did not have a full time job for. Now they ordain you and expect you to volunteer your services.
I am starting to think most degrees are severely overpriced relative to earning potential, and very few are more ridiculously overpriced in terms of time and money than seminary degrees. Having gone to seminary for an academic degree I know that many ministerial students were going deeply into debt, working insane hours for near slave labor wages, and many weren’t even sure if they would have a job when they got out. Those that did have a job lined up were pretty much taking jobs in which they would have to struggle to make ends meet for the rest of their lives. I grew up as a United Methodist pastor’s kid, and I remember going through financial crisis after crisis because my dad couldn’t afford to make ends meet on his meager salary paid by 4 (yes, 4) little churches. When my mom returned to work when I turned 8, things got better. I can’t imagine paying the inflated tuition rates of today and trying to make ends meet as a pastor in many churches!
I graduated from Southeastern Baptist Seminary in North Carolina in 1983. For the first two years, I paid $200 a semester (not a semester hour, a semester) to take a full course load. My third year, when my church membership had changed to Methodist, I paid $400 a semester. I graduated without a penny of debt. I even got a decent education. Now, SEBTS charges $182 a semester hour for Southern Baptists, $365 for non-SBs. All good things must come to an end, I suppose.
Sounds like a typical graduate program to me. Long hours, slave wages, no guarantee of a job. so what else is new?? YAWN.
#4, One of the big differences between seminary and other graduate programs (depending on where you study, granted) is financial returns. Most graduate students who pay the kind of tuition (and do the kind of work) I did are now doctors and lawyers. For doctors and lawyers, the repayment of student loans is, at the very least, manageable. For priests/ministers, not so much.
This isn’t a gripe. Most of us followed where we were led knowing it would be hard on us and on our families for a long time. I think, though, that the debt load borne by seminarians is an issue that seminaries and churches need to consider very seriously.
#4, I agree it is typical of grad school these days, especially in certain fields, and this is a complaint I have of our higher education system in general. However, I think it isn’t necessarily yawn-worthy. We need stories like this to get out so the system gets fixed, scrapped, overhauled, or whatever it takes to end the insanity.