Seminary Enrollment Is Growing. Seminaries Are Still Closing.

The Association of Theological Schools counted more than 81,000 students at its member schools in its 2025-26 data, the highest total since 2006, and 56% of schools grew year over year. It was the second straight year in which more schools grew than shrank (MinistryWatch, reporting ATS data).

The same stretch produced a run of endings. Memphis Theological Seminary set July 31, 2026 as its last day of operation, after a two-year search for a merger or partnership that reviewed 30 institutions and found no match (Action News 5). Its enrollment had been falling roughly 10 to 15 percent a year (Memphis Flyer). In June, Phoenix Seminary announced it would be acquired by Biola University. Its chairman said the board saw a contracting market and chose to act while the school was still financially secure (Religion News Service).

A president who reads only the first set of numbers will plan the wrong year. Rising aggregate enrollment proves the demand exists. It doesn't tell you whether your school can find its share of that demand, reach the right people and enroll them at a cost the budget can carry. That's the question we'd put in front of every seminary president and board chair this fall.

The average hides who is growing

Most theological schools are small, and small schools don't get to live on the average. In the fall 2025 ATS data, 53% of member schools enrolled 150 or fewer students, and just over 30% had less than $1 million in endowment or long-term savings (In Trust). A school that size can lose a dozen incoming students and feel it in the operating budget the same year.

The growth itself is concentrated. Ed Stetzer, dean of Biola's Talbot School of Theology, read the latest data as a field where the largest schools keep getting bigger, mid-sized schools struggle and smaller schools survive by carving out a niche (MinistryWatch). All six Southern Baptist seminaries now sit in the top ten by enrollment.

The headline number also mixes very different kinds of students. The 81,000 figure includes a fast-growing group of non-degree students. Degree enrollment was 74,283, up about 1,600. And headcount isn't tuition: Liberty Theological Seminary reported 6,344 students but 4,743 full-time equivalents. A board watching total headcount can miss a shrinking base of full-time degree students underneath it.

Then there's modality. According to ATS, online-only students grew from 43% to 48% of the total between 2023 and 2025 (MinistryWatch). That changes who a seminary is competing with. A prospective MDiv student in Ohio who can't relocate is now choosing among every school with a credible online program, including the largest ones, which also have the largest recruiting budgets. Geography used to protect a small school's applicant pool. It protects much less of it now.

What the board sees, and what it needs to see

A typical enrollment report to a seminary board arrives in pieces. Marketing brings inquiry counts and website traffic. Admissions brings applications and campus visits. The registrar brings fall headcount, and finance brings net tuition, usually months later. Each number is accurate. None of them tells the board what it cost to enroll a student in a given program, or which recruiting dollars produced the students who showed up.

Fall headcount gets the most attention in the boardroom, and it arrives too late to act on. By the time census day confirms a soft class, the recruiting year that produced it is already over.

We'd ask boards to request a different sequence, where each step sits one rung closer to the institution's finances:

Most schools report comfortably on the first rung. The decisions a president and CFO make sit further down: which program to invest in, whether a recruiting event earns its cost, how much to spend on digital campaigns versus church relationships.

The second rung deserves more attention than it gets. For a seminary, a qualified inquiry depends on things no ad platform can see: whether the person holds the prerequisite degree, whether they're pursuing ordination in a tradition the school serves, whether their church supports them, whether they could realistically start within a year. A campaign that produces hundreds of curious inquiries from people who will never apply looks busy in a monthly report and does nothing for the fall class. Writing down what qualified means, and applying that definition the same way to every source, is where we'd start with any institution.

What one reformed seminary learned in 90 days

One of our clients, a confessionally reformed seminary that has asked us not to name it, had built its enrollment over decades through organic reach and referrals. That pipeline had plateaued, and the school had never run structured paid recruiting. Leadership approved a cost model with a target of $537 per qualified lead, then asked us to design and run a 90-day pilot.

In those 90 days, the pilot produced 127 qualified leads at $175.19 each, 67% below the approved model. Roughly 20 of those leads arrived through AI search tools, with no ad spend behind them (Legacy case study).

We restructured the website around enrollment and built a separate landing page for each degree program. Google Search and Meta campaigns went only after prospects looking for a confessionally reformed school. We wrote content meant to be found through organic search and AI assistants, built follow-up sequences written for a theological audience, and tracked every lead from ad click through inquiry to application.

The biggest difference was language. The landing pages used the seminary's own confessional vocabulary instead of the generic higher-education phrasing most recruiting vendors default to. A prospect looking for a reformed seminary wants evidence that the school shares their convictions, and generic copy offers none. That same specificity is what AI search tools picked up and passed along.

Now the standard we set in the previous section. The lead numbers are observed. The enrollment numbers are estimates. Applying the school's historical rate of 20% from qualified lead to enrolled student gives roughly 25 new students at about $876 each, a cost the school recovers inside the first semester of MDiv tuition.

Those estimates rest on the school's own history, which makes them reasonable. They're still estimates. Our own arithmetic offers a stress test: if the pilot's leads converted at half the historical rate, cost per enrolled student would be about $1,752. Replacing the 20% assumption with observed enrollment, program by program, is the next piece of work, and it's the number a board should ask to see.

That's the lesson we'd pass to other presidents. A school that knows its cost per qualified inquiry can plan a recruiting budget. A school that knows its observed cost per enrolled student, by program, can defend that budget to a board and a CFO.

Five questions for the next recruiting cycle

Most seminaries already collect the data to answer these. The work is connecting it before the fall 2027 class is decided.

1. 01

   What did it cost to enroll one student in each program last year? Count it per student who started classes, online or on campus, and include staff time along with media spend.

2. 02

   Which sources produced our enrolled students? Put that list beside the list of sources that produced the most inquiries. If the two rank sources differently, the budget has been following the wrong one.

3. 03

   How is our headcount changing underneath the total? Split it into degree and non-degree, full-time and part-time, online and residential, program by program. The national data shows how much a single total can hide.

4. 04

   What happens to an inquiry in its first week? Find out who responds, how quickly and with what. A prospective student may be weighing a large school's online program at the same time.

5. 05

   What will the board see in March? If the first reliable enrollment signal a trustee gets is fall census, the board has no real chance to change the outcome.