Theological Education - from Tuition Funding to Subscription Funding

For Christian seminaries to survive they must radically change their business model.

On a recent visit to the cinema I learned that most major theater groups are now offering subscriptions to a continuous supply of movies rather than tickets on a pay as you go basis. Its easy to see why. They are competing with subscription services like Netflix, Apple, and Amazon as well as one another.

Software providers have likewise shifted to a subscription model, and for a similar reason. You can't generate new content and upgrades without a continual revenue stream. If all you do is sell a product then chasing customers for that product becomes both an obsession and a burden that actually keeps the business from moving forward. 

And in the field of education? Subscribing to teaching, content, and even mentoring is rapidly becoming a norm through online providers like YouTube, EdX, Coursera, and others. Christian seminaries seeking only tuition revenue for a single credential are perpetuating an increasingly unsustainable model. The addition of large DMin programs is at best a stop-gap to try to bring students to the seminary for a second time. 

The current business model in almost all seminaries still depends on three sources of revenue: tuition, endowments, and donations. Each of these is a one-off source that forces seminaries to devote major resources to recruitment and development. Moreover, all of these revenue sources are declining and will continue to decline as the US enters an age in which fewer people called to Christian ministry seek traditional degrees, large donors decrease in number as the "boomer" generation leaves its wealth its largely unchurched children, and potential small donors (primarily alumnae) decline in number in concert with long term declines in enrollment. 

For this reason the future of funding for theological education demands the addition of a new source or sources of revenue that actually have the potential to grow; and that is providing continuous teaching available on demand and paid for with subscriptions. On demand teaching will offer knowledge, instruction, and mentoring for the entire lifetime of person engaged in Christian ministry, whether lay or clergy. Credentials, whether certifications in particular fields, diplomas, or degrees will become markers in a process of genuine continuing education.

Institutions embedded in local contexts and able to provide essentially contextualization for ministerial formation can play a critical role in this ongoing process, but to do so they must participate in this emerging paradigm. Otherwise what they have to offer the church will be lost in contextually detached, generic theological education offered badly but accessibly online. 

Using the subscription model we not only offer students thoroughly contextual preparation for ministry, but also an entryway into lifelong continuing education that satisfies the requirements of their credentialing authorities.

For this to happen schools will need to do several things. 

1. They will need to shift their current lay training, continuing education programs into subscription based services rather than event based programs. 

2. Schools will need to see all of their programs, including short courses, certification courses, and continuing education courses as building blocks for degree credit, thus feeding their most intensive and expensive programs. 

3. Schools will need to integrate the distribution of teaching through online courses with teaching offered in classrooms and individual mentoring. Online and classroom must become simply two possible modes of access for students seeking the best fit for their personal needs. 

This is possible through the adaptation of the  Learning Management System as a paradigm. The LMS paradigm allows for a shift from the current system of teaching degree programs and collecting revenue through tuition to a system of offering a wide variety of learning possibilities at different levels of availability and depth paid for with subscriptions at different levels. 

4. Schools that have not already done so will need to re-conceptualize teaching/learning away from semester long courses and toward smaller, modular units of learning that can be more flexibly brought together to create a base of knowledge and experience relevant to ministry. We must remember that there is not magical about the semester. It is a byproduct of a particular, largely irrelevant, European structuring of the social year. 

Ultimately theological educators will need to take a much longer view of our work. We must see each lecture or lesson not in terms of goals for term or semester, or even as meeting the requirements for a degree, but as a way-point in a process of lifelong learning whose ultimate goals are attained many years after receiving a degree, if ever. And in doing so we will need to break free from the model of only teaching degree students. Instead we must understand that our work should systematically integrate the preparation of those called for ministry from adolescence through undergraduate degrees, graduate level studies, post-graduate degrees and/or continuing education. We must not only prepare students for lifelong learning, we must participate in that life long learning.

Ultimately our goal will be that every student becomes a lifelong subscriber to a process of education whose value we have already proven rather than a one-time purchaser of a credential.

Only this use of faculty as resources will make possible the survival of many, if not all, Christian seminaries. But this requires some very practical preparation that I will outline in the next short blog.