I have just finished applying for my first (of several, I presume) student loans to cover the cost of my seminary education.
Thanks to a father determined to pay for my undergraduate degree (as he never got one himself), I graduated from college with exactly $0 in student loans. I know I’m incredibly lucky, especially considering that I graduated from a university averaging $34,000 a year in tuition and other costs. Others in my class left with considerably more debt than I did.
And seminary, in comparison with my undergraduate degree, will cost a whole heck of a lot less money, only $24,000 a year (give or take a thousand or two) for a three year program. $9500 of that will be covered under Princeton’s theological grant, which pays for 100% of my tuition (thanks, Princeton!). But that still leaves a hefty amount for me to cover, hence the loans.
My next two years aught to have better funding available, because I’ll carry an official “inquirer” status (stage one in ordination) and be eligible for a lot more than I am this year. But for now, I’m signing my name to a rather long contract promising to pay back a rather large sum of money to people who don’t particularly care that I’m entering a socially needed, low-funded field.
And I wonder, as I look at statistics that tell me that most seminarians graduate with over $60,000 in debt, that at least 10% will withdraw from the ministry because they simply don’t make enough to pay back their loans, that money is the top concern on the average seminarian/new minister’s mind and not, you know, their ministry — does this make any sense at all?
Why does our education cost so much that we find ourselves absolutely smothered in debt when we are finished? It is expected that other graduate degrees will cost quite a lot of money, sometimes putting the med student or law school student into over $100,000 of debt. But one can reasonably expect to be able to pay off those loans several years into working.
The average starting salary for a minister is $17,000 a year, less than I was making as a bottom-of-the-rung secretary earlier this year.
I don’t think it is the intention of the church to make the cost of educating its ministers so high. My seminary, for one, is known for having the highest amount of financial aid available for its students. And I am grateful for the money I was awarded – it is no small number. But as our economy gets worse and worse, even Princeton’s endowment is shrinking and scholarship money is becoming more scarce. I really had no chance of getting the merit scholarship I was desperately in need of this year as the number of those awarded shrank drastically from previous years.
So this year I take out nearly $20,000 in loans and pray that next year more funding becomes available. And I pray for my fellow seminarians, across the board, that they might see their financial burdens lighten as well. None of us thought we were going into a rich field. We all anticipated that we’d be just this side of poor. But here’s hoping that our loans do not crush us, do not flatten our ministries, do not prevent us from doing that which we were called to do.
—-
