How Many Faculty are Teaching at Seminaries?

A comparison of ATS data over the last 20 years.

Don’t forget that I am offering a discount on subscriptions through December 25th - $40 for the year. You can take advantage through this link.

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The year before I started as a member of the faculty at Eastern Illinois University, we had eleven faculty who were either on the tenure-track or had already received tenure. We had one additional faculty who was full-time but was on a year-to-year contract. That’s a total of twelve full time faculty in 2011.

When we started the 2024-2025 academic year my department had a total of five faculty who were on the tenure-track or who had already received tenure and three who were full-time but were on year to year contracts. That’s a total of eight full time faculty in 2024 - down four lines. This is one of the reasons why I strongly discourage my students from pursuing a doctorate degree in political science. There are few open jobs in academia that will lead to full-time, permanent employment.

That’s a topic that I wanted to explore today but in a religious context. The Association of Theological Schools (ATS), publishes an annual report of data related to their member schools. You can access the most recent edition through this link (PDF). It’s got all kinds of good data and I’ve written about the ATS statistics previously. But today, I wanted to focus squarely on those faculty numbers.

Let me get some definitional things out of the way. These come directly from the above-linked PDF.

Full-Time Faculty - Full-time faculty are individuals with faculty status who devote 50% or more of their time to teaching and/or research.

Full-Time Equivalent - FTE Faculty is the number of faculty members who would be teaching if all faculty were teaching full time (50% or more of their time).

In layman’s terms, full time faculty are what you probably think of when considering college professors. They teach several classes, do advising, serve on committees, mentor students, etc. In contrast, the FTE faculty statistics includes adjuncts. They may teach a class or two on a contingent basis. They probably don’t get paid that well for their labors, either. I know at EIU that we tend to pay about $3,500-$4,000 for a single course.

Let me show you the distribution of Full-Time faculty in all ATS schools according to the annual report that was recently published.

As you can probably tell - the average faculty size in one of these seminaries is pretty darn small. The mode (which is the number that shows up the most in the data) is 5 full-time faculty in a seminary. Remember, EIU’s political science department is 8 FT. A lot of small-ish liberal arts schools will often have four to six full time faculty each in sociology, economics, etc. In other words, there are a whole lot of very small staffs in the seminaries that are members of ATS.

I wanted to show you the distribution of those faculty ranges in a simpler way, so this is a bar graph.