Ryan Burge, who is Professor of Practice at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis, and who co-authored “The Great De-churching” with Reformed Theological Seminary, Orlando grads Jim Davis and Michael Graham, has released an article called “What’s Happening with America’s Seminaries?” on his Substack that has gotten a lot of attention on X. I love to read Ryan’s work. His article has tons of helpful and accurate information and analysis. What he has done is take the ATS ADT (The Association of Theological Schools Annual Data Tables) and run the numbers back about twenty years or so to highlight trends. I think I agree with every conclusion that he draws in his article. But, I’ve also seen folks on X “tricked” by the graphs and data. In fact, I’ve had a few leaders from various theological schools ask me to do “an explainer” on the numbers. So, I want to offer a few reflections and if you are interested in seminary stats, this post may interest you.
1. The SBC seminaries are now among the largest in ATS (and ATS has about 181 member institutions in the US and Canada). The growth of Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary is perhaps the big story in all ATS stats. 25-50 years ago, ATS was dominated by large mainline schools. That has all disappeared. More than two thirds of ATS students now attend evangelical institutions. I think the dominance of SBC institutions shows several things. (1) They are doing a good job of theological education. (2) The SBC is healthier than some of the recent stats indicate. (3) The SBC schools are tapping into the massive growth of nondenominationalism in the US.
2. The number FTE (full time equivalent) is helpful, but can be confusing, and even misleading. Seminary A may have more FTE than seminary B and still be smaller than seminary B! Or seminary A may have less FTE in 2025 than it did in 2024, but actually grow! Allow me to explain. FTE as a measure of seminary size is better than headcount, but not as good as total credit hours (TCH) taught. TCH shows you how many credits the institution is teaching in an entire year. For ATS, FTE is measured by annual Fall enrollment. It gives the institution’s self-reported number of full time equivalent students enrolled for the Fall semester. But, seminaries use different criteria for determining what a full-time student is! The Evangelical Seminary Dean’s Council (ESDC) prefers TCH as a more accurate measure of comparison and size.
Bottom line: If I want to know how large a seminary is, or to compare its size to another seminary, then I want to know the following: (1) What is the school’s TCH, FTE, and headcount (HC) over the course of the entire academic year? (2) How much of that TCH is residential? (3) How many graduates did they have? (4) How many MDiv students do they have? (5) What proportion of their total students are MDiv? (6) How many of their MDiv students are residential? (7) How many full time residential faculty do they have? Those numbers tell me far more than FTE, and those numbers are far less likely to “trick” me.
Let me illustrate. On one of Ryan’s charts, Reformed Theological Seminary was ranked 18th in the top 20 seminaries by FTE. But RTS has a higher annual enrollment, teaches more credit hours, and teaches twice the residential credit hours of the school ranked 10th in FTE! So which school is “larger”? RTS at 18th is larger by a mile than the seminary that is ranked 10th in FTE. How can that be? Partly because RTS is massively in person and the other school is massively online.
Another illustration, in a chart that Ryan produced last year, one of our sister confessional Reformed seminaries was ranked as larger than RTS based on FTE (that school is not in his top twenty this year). But RTS is significantly larger than that institution! How can that be? Again, because most of the other school’s credit hours were online and most of RTS’s credit hours are in person. Students who are residential take more credit hours than online students, they are more full time, and they graduate faster.
One more illustration, one of Ryan’s charts showed RTS down 20% in FTE since 2007. I’m looking at a chart of our TCH from 2004 to 2025 right now as I write this, and RTS is up in TCH over the same timeframe and significantly up in MDiv credit hours. Ryan’s math isn’t wrong. It’s just that FTE isn’t the only or most reliable measure of size and growth.
3. Size is NOT the most important thing about theological education! Just because an institution is bigger, doesn’t mean that the education is better. For instance, Westminster Seminary California is tiny in comparison to Liberty University‘s Rawlings School of Divinity. But Westminster California is entirely residential with no online education at all. Rawlings is 92% online! It’s apples and oranges, and no one in higher theological education would doubt the academic rigor and quality of Westminster California’s program.
4. That said, let me give you an angle on the assessment of actual size of institutions. Ryan’s numbers (based as they are on ATS ADT) give a generally accurate impression of institutional size. But consider the following.
(1) Rawlings School of Divinity is far and away the largest ATS school in terms of FTE, but RTS (which is significantly smaller by the measure of FTE) has more residential students and teaches more residential credit hours! Also, it appears that RTS has more permanent, full time, residential faculty (Rawlings uses a massive number of Adjunct faculty). So which school is larger? I would still say Rawlings, but comparing the schools is apples and oranges. RTS is 80% in person, Rawlings is 92% online. This just reminds you that in the ATS numbers for FTE no distinction is made between residential and online. What that hides is the tremendous shift to online education in the last twenty years.
(2) So, when I factor in FTE and HC over an entire academic year, and TCH, and especially when I consider how much of the education is done in person (as opposed to online), RTS is somewhere in the top ten of ATS institutions in “size.” But again, size is not the most important thing in theological education. At RTS, our aspiration is not to be the biggest, but the best. We want to do a better job for our students than any other institution. “Best is the standard.”
I’m working on writing more on all this! Stay tuned!