A Word about Stats for the Growth and Size of Seminaries
How can that be? Partly because RTS is massively in person and the other school is massively online.
Another illustration, in a chart that Ryan produced last year, one of our sister confessional Reformed seminaries was ranked as larger than RTS based on FTE (that school is not in his top twenty this year). But RTS is significantly larger than that institution! How can that be? Again, because most of the other school’s credit hours were online and most of RTS’s credit hours are in person. Students who are residential take more credit hours than online students, they are more full time, and they graduate faster.
One more illustration, one of Ryan’s charts showed RTS down 20% in FTE since 2007. I’m looking at a chart of our TCH from 2004 to 2025 right now as I write this, and RTS is up in TCH over the same timeframe and significantly up in MDiv credit hours. Ryan’s math isn’t wrong. It’s just that FTE isn’t the only or most reliable measure of size and growth.
