Last year, 74,283 individuals pursued graduate theological degrees in Canada and the United States, the largest number since The Association of Theological Schools (ATS) began keeping track in 1969. And while just 7,081 people enrolled in credit-bearing, non-degree offerings at these schools, that number represents an amazing 51% increase in non-degree students in three years.
Record numbers are reason to celebrate, especially after nearly two decades of declining enrollment. They’re also an opportunity to investigate: Just who are these 81,000-odd individuals who feel called to graduate theological education today at an ATS-accredited school? Numbers and narratives from the field give a complex and nuanced answer to a deceptively simple question.
The concept of a single “average” or “typical” graduate theological student has been obsolete for decades. The Rev. David McAllister-Wilson, D.Min., who retired in June after 24 years as president of Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C., knows this from firsthand experience. He spent a total of 44 years at the United Methodist school. When he arrived from California as a master of divinity student in 1982, he and his classmates had significant commonalities: They were mainly recent college graduates attending Wesley as full-time M.Div. students.
The number of students under the age of 25 as well as those over the age of 50 is growing.
“Almost everybody was on an ordination track,” he said. At the time, Wesley already had some denominational and gender diversity. But McAllister-Wilson said a real breakthrough occurred later that decade when the school began welcoming part-time students. Almost immediately, the idea of a “typical” student was exploded: Wesley attracted more women students, Black students, Korean students, older students. Those changes exemplified what many schools did or would soon be doing in that era.
“We had to adjust to meet the changing nature of those wanting to go to seminary,” McAllister-Wilson said. “We were following the lead of the student market.”
Generational shifts
That movement toward more student diversity continues. Annual data collected by ATS from each of its member schools in 2025 indicates an overall increase in the number of students from every demographic category, including race or ethnicity, age, and gender.
Today, about a quarter of graduate theological students follow the path that McAllister-Wilson did, relocating to become a full-time, degree-seeking student in residence at a seminary or theological school, said Chris Meinzer, senior director and chief operating officer at ATS. Catholic and Orthodox seminarians working toward ordination often fall into this category, but so do smaller numbers of students at mainline and evangelical institutions. More students from all church traditions pursue educational opportunities closer to home or in hybrid or fully online programs. These options opened up with the revised ATS accreditation standards of 2010, and they’ve grown in popularity since the 2020 redeveloped standards.
About a third of graduate theological students today are working toward an M.Div. degree, long the premier offering at ATS member schools. The number of M.Div. students increased last year, as did the number of students in nearly every degree program — only the “Other Professional Doctoral Degree” category saw a decline. The expansion of programs and modalities has contributed to making theological education more accessible.
Christopher M. The, Ph.D., director of student data and research at ATS, said that most graduate theological students today are established in their careers, and while they may be looking to change careers, they’re not returning to school to get a credential to enter ministry.
“Most of our students are already in ministry,” The said.
The oversees ATS’ student questionnaires, a trove of data reported by students themselves about their personal demographics and their experience, interests, and expectations regarding theological education and ministry. Typically, about 30% of incoming students respond to the Entering Student Questionnaire (ESQ), so it’s not a complete picture, but their responses offer meaningful insights. For instance, The reported in the December 2025 issue of Colloquy that preliminary data from new students in 2025 show that 63% are choosing full-time study — a statistically significant increase from the overall range of 58-60% since 2020. And across all religious traditions and academic programs, fewer incoming degree-seeking students are opting for fully online programs. There has been increased interest in fully online non-degree programs, suggesting that “non-degree seekers continue to value the flexibility and accessibility offered by fully online options,” The wrote.
Statistics can be illuminating, but not in every situation. For instance, responses to the 2024 ESQ showed that there is growth in the number of students under the age of 25 as well as those over the age of 50 — but the attention-grabbing statistic about student age was that the average had risen to 40.4, a new high. Helen Blier, Ph.D., director of the Center for Lifelong Learning at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia, and president of the Association of Leaders in Lifelong Learning for Ministry (ALLLM), says that within lifelong learning programs in particular, average age doesn’t matter.
“You’ve got lifelong learning programs geared for young adults in vocational discernment, programs for people who want to do ministry as a second career — ages are all over the place,” she said. “It really does depend on the type of program.”
Focusing on details instead of the big picture helps with perspective. For example, the youngest group of students, those under 25, constitutes just 9% of all graduate theology students. The number of Catholic students in that age group has spiked 52% since 2005. In that time, the number of similarly aged evangelical and mainline students is down, 42% and 34% respectively.
Elsie Miranda, D.Min., director of Culture and Community Engagement at ATS, thinks the Catholic spike is partially due to the “Francis effect”— young people who were in high school or college during Francis’s papacy were inspired by his focus on ecology, social justice and migration, and some have pursued graduate theological education because of that. But it’s complicated. Sister Anne Anderson, CSJ, former president and vice chancellor of the University of St. Michael’s College in Toronto, still sees an older dynamic at play, where highly conservative students seek ordination in the Catholic Church, and where limited employment options for lay people are a reason why numbers of Catholic graduate theology students of any age aren’t higher.
Students who are attracted to lifelong learning programs aren’t looking to continue in a master’s program…
On the other end of the spectrum, students aged 50 and up have slowly and steadily increased over the past 36 years, from 9.6% in 1989 to 25.6% in 2025. Tracy Riggle Young, Ph.D., who oversaw enrollment management at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary before joining ATS as Associate Director of Initiatives, said there’s a common profile among these students. They are often established lay leaders in their congregations who have reached a point in their lives where they have more money, more time, and unsatiated theological curiosity. They are “humble enough to know they want to learn something from trained people,” Young said, and they want to do it within a community. Their pastor may have recommended seminary to them, not necessarily as a step toward ordination, but as a way to nurture their own spiritual development and complement their congregational involvement.
Context Matters
Students don’t see their chosen institution as totally interchangeable with others — they enroll at a specific school for a specific set of reasons, Meinzer said. Macro statistics don’t quite get to the heart of who’s showing up where. “Each institution has its own character,” Meinzer said. “Context matters. A student at Princeton is going to be different from a student at Southwestern Baptist and different from a student at Weinbrenner and different from a student at Franciscan School of Theology. That’s just true.”
Meinzer, Blier, and McAllister-Wilson agree that many schools have generally become more sensitive to what students want or need. “If a person says, ‘I’m going to pursue a graduate non-degree certificate,’ and that’s what they need to feel prepared for the ministry that they’re being called to, I think that’s the story,” Meinzer said. And Blier said most students who are attracted to lifelong learning programs aren’t looking to continue in a master’s program, despite what schools might hope for — they’re different types of programs for good reason. For example, Columbia offers a certificate in older adult ministry.
“We find that there are a lot of folks who do Stephen Ministry or serve as chaplains or do something else in the church. They’re not clergy. They’re laity, and they intend to remain laity,” she said. The drive for them to get a certificate, Blier said, is “a combination of internal motivation and perceived need in the world rather than an external set of determiners, like the standard M.Div. curriculum of the theological school, or the standard expectations of a denomination for ministerial leadership.”
Blier sees another strong undercurrent in this generation of students. “Times are anxious,” she said. “As people have less faith and trust in institutional churches, I think they might be looking toward spiritual practices as a way to respond to that anxiety and to anchor themselves to something bigger than themselves. So spirituality programs are really popular right now.”
Something New
McAllister-Wilson has been thinking back to how things were when he started his path at Wesley. “There were some pretty deep tracks,” he said. “You went through a process of ordination, you went to seminary, you went to a church, then another, then another, and maybe you became a district superintendent, and the best and the brightest became bishops. That sort of job-for-life understanding has changed.”
He thinks fewer students today see ministry as a stable, lifelong, linear profession, even as that’s still a reasonable expectation for some, depending on their church tradition. There’s a rise in understanding ministry as more fluid, even for those seeking ordination. Instead of a job for life, ministry might mean bivocational or shorter-term options.
In some ways, it mirrors the development of other segments of the North American labor force. McAllister-Wilson said getting a job in the church used to be like joining the United Auto Workers or the Teamsters, even though the church used different language to describe it. “That’s what you were going to do for your career, and at 65 retire.
Students coming in today, they don’t have that careerist sense,” he said. “That expectation has changed, just as the job market has changed.”
And while students today differ from the careerist students of the 1980s and earlier, they also differ from a type of student that he saw more frequently in the 1990s, a type he calls the “pure curiosity” student. These folks enrolled at seminary because they wanted to learn, but they didn’t really know what they were going to do with their education. Today’s students have a different vibe. “There’s a general sense of responding to a call to ministry. And in some ways that is stronger now than it had been,” he said.
While no one can sum up all 81,000 individuals studying and participating in North American graduate theology programs this year, McAllister-Wilson’s assessment of the students he’s come to know at the end of his long tenure in the field offers encouragement. “They’re closer to the ground — they don’t have illusions about what ministry is going to be. They’re open to being innovative. It’s an interesting group. I’m pretty optimistic.”
