McNewspaper: Seminaries Face Same Pressures as Others

USA Today today* carries a story about the financial pressures hitting seminaries and Bible colleges. Said pressures are provoking innovation, consolidation and, in some cases, closing.

Here's what SWNID has to say on the topic:

• The article portrays the situation as accurately as one could expect.
• Essentially these are the same pressures presently faced by all IHEs, nonprofits and businesses in general.
• If there is a particular pressure, it is that seminary and Bible college enrollment has been in an extended growth phase for some time. That it now moves in another direction is to be expected, as nothing moves in a straight line.
• If there is another particular pressure, it is that seminaries and Bible colleges, with some notable exceptions, have been slow to adapt and innovate. We'd say that their slowness in this regard is much less than their loudest critics generally allege but enough to present issues in the short term. In particular, Bible colleges have not adapted to the new realities of traditional undergraduate student recruitment. In particular, the Association of Theological Schools has been loath to allow extensive online education.
  
• That having been said, these institutions are in general small enough to be nimble enough to adapt quickly when they have to. They can and probably will get focused, get lean, and get properly (not trendily) innovative. We fully expect that these institutions will largely survive and be stronger at the other end of a painful but necessary process.
• The financial pressures on the students at such institutions are real, endemic, and not as terrible as one might think. Yes, they're real: students need to pay expensive tuition and won't earn a lot of money after graduation. Indeed, they're endemic: the genteel poverty of the manse is a familiar topos in Western literature. Notably, they're not all that terrible: (a) Bible colleges charge private-college tuition but are cheaper than other privates (SWNID's, not a cheap one, charges less than the some public universities in Ohio); (b) Seminaries cost dough, but much less dough than other professional schools; (c) ministers don't make a lot, but in the main they do roughly as well as some other arts-based, helping professions like school teachers (their financial pressures have much to do with the disparity between their social status and their economic status; cf. the impoverished manse in literature as noted above).
  
• A not-too-cursory review of those institutions that have closed in the last year reveals that Charles Darwin's model is at work. None of the defunct institutions were very fit before the financial crisis; all had obvious handicaps.
• For those Campbellites who have believed the church's mission might be better served if some of our Bible colleges and seminaries cooperated or even merged, we optimistically suspect that your hypothesis may be on the verge of being tested in the real world.
  
• The comments on USA Today's article aren't worth engaging, as is typical of comments on most web sites, with the exception of this one. We note that the preponderance of comments come from militant atheist types who are fond of asserting that a divinity degree is pointless and commercially worthless. We wonder how many theological-degree-holders such militant atheists actually know. Suspecting that their conclusion is mere supposition, we indict their self-styled rigorous, rational empiricism. We note further that it seems to be the militant atheists who are underemployed enough to have the leisure to post such comments in numbers disproportionate to their presence in the general population.

With that, back to work.**

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*Kindly excuse the stammer.

**N. B. that SWNID has been continuously employed since earning our first of several theological degrees nearly three decades ago, except when we were studying full time for yet another degree.