student debt
My synod’s efforts to help pastors with their finances
Meeting personal money challenges can’t be the responsibility of ministers alone.
What pastors get paid, and when it’s not enough
Financial stress is harming ministers—some more than others.
by C. Kirk Hadaway and Penny Long Marler
Luther Seminary to pilot two-year M.Div.
The M.Div.X program hopes to train innovative church leaders—with no student debt, says seminary president Robin J. Steinke.
Loaded with debt
Many reforms are needed to make college affordable. The main one, however, is cheaper tuition—which requires greater public investment.
A grassroots jubilee: Debt resister Thomas Gokey
"One of the powers of debt is to isolate us. We have to overcome that isolation, and it's tricky."
interview by Amy Frykholm
Paying for seminary: M.Div.s in debt
Schools rely on tuition and are reluctant to turn students away. But if debt keeps students from following their call, schools will have failed at their mission.
by Sharon Miller and Christian Scharen
Pastors in poverty
Most of us have seen this coming for a decade, but it’s still startling to read the headlines in the Atlantic: "The Vanishing of Middle Class Clergy."
None of this is news. We know pastors who feed their children with food stamps.
Watching the academy gut itself
The cost of tuition has has gone up 1,200 percent in 30 years. The odd thing is that when a person takes full advantage of the educational system and earn a Ph.D., then the very same universities that have been trying to convince us that education is worth that much inflation, turns around and tells the Ph.D. that their hard work is worth about . . . 1-3K per class for an adjunct teaching position. So the value of education is being cut by the very same people who are trying to sell us an education.